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Adding Facial Topology in 3ds Max

by Justin Marshall

In this course, we'll cover methods for adding topology to our existing model to make creating mouth shapes and expressions feasible. Software required: 3ds Max 2010.

What you'll learn

When focusing on animation, having a character to work with is important. In a previous course, we covered the process of building a basic bipedal character that we could use to practice our animation. The character can work well as we attempt to show action and emotion through only the movement of the body. While this is great practice for getting the most out of our character's body movements, at some point we'll probably want to start creating facial expressions and even make our character speak. We can do this by adding geometry to define the mouth of our character. In this course, we'll cover methods for adding topology to our existing model to make creating mouth shapes and expressions feasible. We'll use a variety of tools in 3ds Max to manually add and remove edges and generally reroute the geometry as needed. We'll also add geometry for the interior of the mouth and make sure the head is reassembled with the existing body. Software required: 3ds Max 2010.

About the author

Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials, and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist. As an author, Justin enjoys collaborating with fellow authors, especially on project... more

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