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MicroScribe® Connections for Maya - Female Portrait Bust

Courtesy of Bryce Gunkel

Figure 1: Concept sketches

Figure 2: The clay model

Figure 3: Digitized polygons

Figure 4: Shaded polygonal view

Figure 5: The final smoothed version

After looking at all the other projects shown in Immersion’s gallery I decided to make a human female portrait. I chose this primarily because just about every other character model that I saw in the gallery was either an overly cartoon-like human or some random animal with human features, so I decided to take it upon myself to create a sculpture with the intentions of a high polycount, and as much realism as I could manage.

My first task was to come up with a concept of what this character would look like. After all if I were to blindly jump into the sculpture stages without any visualization of what I was making, the results would be less than spectacular. So after a few different takes, the concept was in the ballpark. The character was relatively simple with no wild outcroppings of hair and the like, making for easier topology. With this stage completed I moved on to sculpting the head (actually just half of it), this was done using Roma Plastalina clay, and took about 4-5 hours.

With the sculpture completed I began marking up my masterpiece, creating a series of intersecting lines, forming grids along the surface. I paid careful attention to how I was laying the axis, creating particular edge loops around the eyes and mouth of the sculpture so that the final 3D models geometry would be capable of clean animation.

I then began digitizing the model into Maya using the MicroScribe Connections for Maya plug-in and a method based around the polygon-strip method included in the plug-in tutorial. After forming a series of strips horizontally across the surfaces I then went back with the create polygon tool to create smaller, individual polygons to help break up and smooth the topology. Then, by selecting all of the polygons and using the combine tool followed by the merge vertices option within Maya, I created one large cohesive polygonal surface.

The next few hours of my process entailed moving individual points (vertices), and rearranging edges to create cleaner geometry. The concept behind this was that my final model should consist of no 5-sided polygons, very few 3-sided polygons, and primarily 4-sided polygons. This is because four sided polygons are the easiest to predict distortions with when animating.

With my geometry finally cleaned up I then mirrored the ½ of the head that I had across the x-axis to create a full head. From here I just did a simple polygon smooth command to add extra geometry and further smooth out my model for the final renders. Some things you may notice when looking at the final model is that the jaw line appears a bit wider than the original sculpture, and that the ear isn’t really accurately modeled. Both of these things I consider minor details for what they’re worth, both of which may be fixed in just a few minutes of work. However, since they don’t bother me too much, I’ve opted to leave them as is for now.