I’m having a particular annoying problem that I may need to do something about before long …… I’ll keep this brief because you have all heard this before from me, but my character’s face keeps mashing up during the symmetry process.

I believe this is being caused because I create the head separate then attach it to the body mesh before the symmetry modifier in the stack.

To combat this problem today I added an edit poly modifierAbove the symmetry but below the turbo smooth (otherwise I would be there for weeks moving millions of verts). Then using this new edit polly I set about deleting a hell of a lot of segments down the middle of the face that were all over the place and would not weld together. Like above the nostrils in the picture below, thats the middle of the face and should be a nice straight line:

I then set about recreating all the pollys that I had deleted by manually creating new pollys. This is all well and good but it has been bloody time consuming and annoying. Helped along by the fact that it kept crashing and corrupting the file, after a lot of crashes I decided to begin counting by not dismissing the error reports and seeing how many I could stockpile.

23!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This whole process I have gone through to ‘bodge’ together a problem that should not even exist is going to give me a headache later, I can already feel it coming.

Right, after a long break it was straight back at where I left off. As you may recall my Inca had a hell of a lot of polly’s in him and I could not find a computer to handle it. To solve the problem I have added an ‘optimize’ modifier to the stack which has taken the count down to a slightly more manageable 90,000, at the expense of some detail. (not too sure how this will come out on here):

One of the biggest troubles I was having was using the cloth modifier to add his clothes to him but even the Mac’s at uni couldn’t handle the work even with the model optimised. For this reason I have decided to just create the cloths around him, then add attach them to the mesh and have the skin modifier deform them correctly. Not ideal as I would have liked to learn how to do this but I guess I have enough learning to do for the moment.

Learning from my previous mistakes I have begun to model my school boy but going about it slightly different. First I have just modelled his clothes as part of him rather than model him then add clothes later.

Second I have kept the whole modifier stack, not losing the symmetry which gave me a whole world of problems with the last guy.

Finally I have mapped the pollys to their relevant material ID’d in a multisub material map. At the moment they just have standard colours from Max in, I might have to leave it like that, we shall see how time pans out.

Just one more thing, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME???????? You may recall that previously I had modelled the last character with his palms face out, which is the wrong direction for it to be skinned. Well this time I mad him palms down but I have in all my madness managed to put the thumbs on the back of his hands! Doh.