2.0 Reference Plates/Splines

Once the Topology was complete I opened up 3ds max and created a plane object. Next I needed to open up the material editor and import my PSD file that I had produced. I then added a UVW Map modifier to the plane, this made the photo retain it's original aspect ratio. I then clicked on Bitmap Fit which brought back the dimensions and it could also be adjusted to fit the plane. I also bumped the self illumination in the material editor up to 100 so the photo could seen at any angle.

I then needed to create another plane but with the side view of my face. I did this by coping the first plane and rotating it around to the correct position. The view ports were then set up to show the just the left and front views, as these were the only ones I would be using.

Now I needed to start the modeling process. I started with the Line tool to connect all of the quads of the Topology by making building up small quad shapes that would cover my whole face and make a mesh to work with. I used the snap tool with vertex checked to make this process simpler to complete.

Once the whole face was complete I selected one line shape and converted it to an editable poly. Here I used the attach tool to connect all the splines together to make one line object. I also used the Weld tool to reduce the amount of vertices's that were used in the model. This would over half the amount of verts thus making it less likely to make a mistake later on.