It's life Jim, but not as we want it!

What do you make of it????? I have shoulders, a neck, ears, nostrils, cheek bones, lips and a whole load of other stuff but I am not convinced this is going to turn out looking like me!

Anyway. Since last time I have progressed a lot through some serious hours at the pc. lets begin with the nose eyes and lips. The tutorials we were following were quite informative, we had to learn how to use new selection methods to select edges and produce new ones, and then weld everything together. The process was relatively simple although time consuming, you spend a lot of time tweaking various elements.

The neck. The guy in the tutorial cheated! He picked a guy that has no neck. You would assume after defining complex facial features you would find it easy to create a round head and neck, WRONG. It is surprisingly difficult as there are several points where the flow of the geometry has to change direction, for instance at the back of the head and where the neck meets the shoulders and so on. I had attempted this three times and was getting nowhere as the geometry from the sphere was flowing in the wrong direction. It wasn't until in class today when Paul (fellow student) pointed out that I had to create a different shape to change the geometry from going round in circles to going straight down. After this realisation the rest of the head went pretty smoothly. Its always the simple things.

Then came the ears, well, what the hell? Who invented ears? I'll tell you who, some snotty jobsworth that knew one day I would have to recreate them in 3D and he thought "how can I make this difficult for him?" Well he succeeded. The ears are by far the hardest thing I have done on this project, no, Ever done in 3D max. The geometry is complex but the hardest part is connecting it to the head. It is really hard to see what you are doing and you have to turn around a lot of segments so they don’t pinch and stretch when you connect them. On the eats I have managed to get the curl under (on the back outer rim of your ear) but adding edges, moving them closer to the face then pulling them past the lines they are connected to.