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Getting A Head in Maya (Part 1: Setup)
By Scott Ryan
Recreating a human head is one of the hardest things to do. Everyone knows what they look like and when you’ve done it wrong, but most people can’t tell you what the actual problem is. That’s why I’m such a big fan of Reference Material. You need good, clean, preferably high resolution front and side view photographs. Good images will be doubly useful, both for modeling and for creating an appropriate color map later. There are plenty of places to find these images online. 3d.sk is an excellent source of human references. If you don’t feel like spending money, then grab a camera and a friend who’s willing to let you take a couple mug shots. Now that you’ve got your pictures, you need to get them ready for Maya. Load them up in Photoshop, because Maya likes square, 72 dpi tiffs. Chances are good your image isn’t going to be square. You’ll have to change the canvas size (Image: Canvas Size). If it’s too wide, crop it down. If it’s too tall, increase the width. Make sure the files are at 72 dpi (Image: Image Size). You also have to make sure the two images are the same scale and lined up vertically, or at least as close as you can get. Copy one image onto a layer above the other image and decrease its opacity. Try to match up the hair line, eyes, nose, and mouth. Guidelines can be helpful here. Chances are the subject of your photograph didn’t sit perfectly upright or even at the same angle between front and side shots, and the image will need to be rotated and scaled. Even then it may not be enough and you’ll just have to use your own judgment when it’s time to start modeling with them. You may want to select half the front view, copy it, and flip horizontal in order to make the face perfectly symmetrical, but since I only model half of the head and mirror it in Maya, I’m not sure what the point is. I suggest you save this as a psd, just in case you need it again later, and save out the front and side views as separate tiff files. Now we can finally get to Maya! The very first thing you want to do is go to File and create a New Project. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve seen get messed up because of this. Give it a name and tell it to use defaults for everything else. We have to set up the image planes, now. Make a new Lambert material and name it Front. Place your front image in the color channel. Create a polygon plane with width and height the same as your image size, divisions of one, and name it Front IP. Assign Front to FrontIP (IP = Image Plane) and rotate the plane so it’s the right way up and facing the front view. Go to Modify: Freeze Transformations and Edit: Delete by type: History. Remember those two things. You’re going to do that a lot when you’re modeling. Now make a Side Lambert and a Side IP plane, just like the front, only this one faces the side. Go to your Layer Editor and make a new layer. Name it IP (double click). Select your image planes, right click the layer and assign them to it. Set the display type to Reference (Click the empty box next to the “V” in the layer until it says “R”). Now you can see them but not select them while you’re modeling. We’ll get to that next, I hope. This is a first for me, so I hope I didn’t dumb it down too much or leave out anything unknown for a beginner. I hope to get Part 2: Beginning the Head posted no later than a week from now. If I get a lot of comments requesting clarification, I can post a Part 1.5 between then and now. |
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PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
My 3D Work
My 3D work portfolio page.
www.will-lapuerta.com/3d/index.html
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