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3D Studio Max
.
Modelling a nose using Surface tools by David op De Beéck
Email: David op De Beéck --- Web: opdebeeck.cgcommunity.com
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I've written this tutorial in response to a request for a tutorial on spline modelling a nose on Maxforums. It's been awhile since I used surface tools as I've been useing mostly polymodelling lately. It touk me quite some time too
creating this still slightly messy nose, and I'm sure if I would have used my familiar polymodelling technique
demonstarted in my mouth modelling tutorial I would have cut my time at least in half. Still and this is the point I want
to make, this might not be the qui ckest of techniques but it does teach you valuable things. It's my opinion that everymodeller should at least have tried every one of the more popular techniques like NURBS, spline modelling,
polymodelling and boxmodelling before sticking to one. This teaches you for one to see things from a different
perspective, it forces you to rethink your strategy and it might even surprise you at times when you'll think ofsomething you just couldn't see before.
Spline modelling is excellent in the way that it forces you to use a minimum of splines to create your shape, you are
forced to think before you act. If you don't you'll end up with a mess of bezier curves that you just can't handle. Even
more it will get extremly hard to get a smooth surface.
I hope this tutorial will learn both the spline modeller and other modellers a thing or two about modelling with splines
but also about modelling in general. I don't want to stress this tutorial as being A NOSE TUTORIAL, it shouldn't reallymatter what you are modelling, what is important is that you study your subject first and once you think you know
enough it is time to open your modelling tool.
Ok enough said, lets get going :
I started with taking some pictures of my own face, A digital camera can be a very valuable tool for every modeller.Of course it's an expensive toy so you might just want to settle for a webcam, they come cheap and do wonders
studying your own face.
I used a side view and a front view photo in the right and front viewports of Max. My 3th picture was one of thebottem side of my nose which I used just as a refernce to remind me how everything looked down there :)
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A beautiful nose so my girlfriend tells me :), personally I might have created myself with a slightly different design butI guess we don't have much say in that do we. Now we modellers do can play God in our own limited way by shaping
our models the way we want. So that at least softens the pain and frustration ;)
Ok down to Max
In the side view I created my first line, I placed a number of
points where you see red dots. Think about where you placethese !! You don't want more dots then neseccary, less is
better then to much.
Most of the ones I placed where needed for the curve the
nose was making, at the dot marked with the red A my nosebone bumps out slightly so I choose to add enough points to
make this visible in my model.
Soon you'll need to connect curves so you'll get a grid thatforms the skeleton of your model. You do this in the
perspective viewport and put 3d snap on (button marked with
a B)
If you right click on the 3d snap button the grid and snap
settings open and you can select different snap settings. Iused snap to endpoint and deselected all the rest for this
tutorial.
You should read up on how to work with splines somewhere
else as I will not go into depth on this subject. An excellenttutorial you can find on the website of my friend Erik Asorson.
Here you see how I created a second curve with
corresponding verts to the first curve. See to it that theycorrespont as you will need to connect them later to make the
overlapping skin or surface. Again try to feel how your subject
is build, what is important and what is not.
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You see here how I created a 3th line (top), these 3 linesdefine the global shape of the nose, all we need to do is
connect all the points with curves so that quadpatches areformed.
A quadpatch is a surface with 4 corner points. You can alsocreate tripatches with 3 corner points but they are harder to
smooth out and and most modellers avoid using them.
If you add a "surface" modifier on top of your modifier stack
you can see the effect right away and start tweaking thosebezier handles until everything is smooth.
I've seen tutorials that prefer to create everything in one
viewport and afterwards dragging all points in the correct 3dimentional position. This however is in my opinion a real
headache, if you take it one step at a time and makeeverything smooth right after you created it you won't get
frustrated and there's less chance you'll give up on your thenseemingly hopeless mess.
So far so good, I'm getting some good results as I go so I'm
still relaxed and happy. Of course now comes a bit of adifficulty, the entire nastral thingie, baaahhh time to give up :)
No just take it easy, get some food, a drink and again one
step at a time, think before you act. You want a minimum of
control points, that's important. You will also need the topviewport more often now to get a good view on thos
horizontal curves.
Follow the screenshots and find out how I create this nastral.
As I go I'm inserting more points, refining those curves. Don't
mind about having to much ponts to create that surface, we'll
deal with that later. Just always minimize that's all that isimportant.
This is not polymodelling and the biggest difference is thatwith bolymodelling you need a poly for every detail. Here
however you have bezier curves that give you a LOT ofcontrol over that surface without needing much patches.
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See how I create new lines and points to create the shape Ineed.
You'll notice in the left image that I create straightunsmoothed curves inbetween the controlpoints. I always do
this because it's easy to smooth them out afterwards,however it is hard to create them making cureves right away
as the curves are hard to control especially in the perspective
view.
This is where one could use the Splinetools script. With it you
can select part of a spline and smooth that instead ofsmoothing the points at the end of the splines segment.
The way I do this is create the segment as a straight curve,
then convert the segment to a smooth curve and then,convert it to a bezier. Why go through the extra smooth step,
well you'll see that when you do this you're bezier handle willbe nicely along side your curve where else when you go from
straigth to bezier you will have trouble finding your bezier
handle.
TIP : When you press the icon marked with the red circle and
lettre A you can see the effect of the surface on your splinecage. You can model away while the effect of the surface
modifier is directly visible.
Note :sometimes the surface flips it's normals, or even just a
few patch normals but not all. Don't worry about this, it willget back right when you close a few holes here and there.
TIP2 : use the Fuse button to get points to pack together as ifwelded but without actually welding them.
TIP3 : Use area selection to select groups of points instead ofindividual points.
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This might seem like a sudden jump forward but all I did was
simply pull tht point that was there all along upwards makinga cavety. I did a lot of teaking the bezier handles here to
make it all look good with this minimal amount of points.
If you are wondering how I made the skin transparent, well
it's a Max feature, no plugins required. Press Alt-X to do it !!
You see I made a bit of a mess creating as much curves as Idid above the nastral. I will clean this up later !
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There are still quite a bit of things I would tweak better before actually call it finished. But for this tutorialthis result will do.
I hope this was usefull, insightfull and maybe even fun to read, who knows. In case you want to contact me forquastions
remarks, or just a friendly chat you can reach me at opdebeeck@cgcommunity.com or at david@artdwarf.com
Email: David op De Beéck --- Web: opdebeeck.cgcommunity.com
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