From Start to Finish..... Head Meshing

Meshing the Head (page4)

Now comes the meat and potatoes of the head. (We just finished the salad with the bun.)

I'm clearing my screen and importing the bwar's obj file. I like to start out by making it as long as I will need it so I have a defined workspace, so I will select the bottom of the hair and then import a femlae body OBJ. Which one doesn't really matter, just something close to what you're going to be using.

I'll move the vertices down about waist length, since Shi has really long hair. Then I'll delete the body in the groups tab to get it out of my way. I just needed it as a referrence point.

This is the part where the keyboard short cuts come in handy. It's really small, so to see it, I use shift-L to zoom in the windows and crtl-L to move the graph and mesh view around. Just remeber, don't have the "select" button selected or nothing will happen.

To watch the transformation on the preview model, I'll load up the head texture on this head, just like I did earlier.

I'll move some of the vertices around on the back of the head to distribute the mesh more evenly, and to shape the full hair by scaling some areas out. For basic hair mesh editing, this is the step you'd be doing: loading up a head, moving veretices around and then exporting it back out.

I'm not to worried about making the top of the head match the fullness on the bottom since I still have that other section to add on. But now that the basic shape is there. I'm going to start phasing in the other section, the bun section, and moving vertices around both of those meshes to blend them together. So I import it in.

Looks kinda like a weird cap right now. So to at least get the texture on it, I select the entire bun section, and reassign the texture to it.

That's better looking. Parts of the bun section overhang the head, though, and don't blend into the head like it needs to. It looks kind of hard to spot, but an easy way to find trouble areas like that is to right click on the preview window and then uncheck the "draw backfaces" selection. You can see in this screenshot to the right now, circled in yellow, where the problem areas are. If I had left it alone, this is what would have shown up in the game and on SimShow. They don't draw backfaces.

So here begins the tedious process of blending, shifting and adjusting, deleting unecessary vertices to conserve space for conversion. Boy, I picked a heck of a complicated demonstration for this tutorial. It's not generally this complicated, except for the more detailed Skins you may make. But I think the end product is worth it, so I don't mind.

A half an hour later, I have it the way I want it.

Now, time for the fringies. I have also decided that the bun part needs a ponytail section on the bottom to make it look better. I haven't seen any pictures of her from behind, so I'm doing alot of guesswork here. I just think it would look quite nice that way, and maybe some trailing red ribbons would look good, too.

For the ponytail, I will use a basic sphere shape, chopped down with as little faces and vertices as possible of course. Then I'll scale, smoosh and move vertices around untill I have a nice ponytail. Then I will assign the same texture to the ponytail, map it, move it into position, and ta-daa! Ponytail!

I also want a few chunks of hair falling over her shoulder, so using the same technique, I can fashion one out, using the a body model as a guide so I know where it needs to lie.

Lastly comes the fringies around the face. Those I'll make with cylinders, but I think to cut down on the amount of work needed, I'll make one, duplicate it, and move it around to give the fringies some movement and "life" to them. Then I can also duplicate a few and mirror the vertexes left and right like I did for the ribbons way back when. It beats making them all individually.

As usual, I'll texture map those to the hair parts of the .bmp.

Here's the finished results:

Now I export it as a Wavefront OBJ to my project folder, cuz I'm ready to turn it into a real head! Finally, I can shut down MS3D.

Now, for turning this mesh into a head, I'm gonna do it a little differently than I did for the body in the "Mesh Adjusting the Body" chapter. Normally, I would use that procedure, but since I added some stuff to the original mesh (which won't work with a body due to the internal skeleton without some special software, so don't bother trying it) I'm going to import it as an OBJ, instead of opening up the .spj file like I would if I had just moved some vertices around.

I open up SKN2OBJ. In the file menu, I select "import .obj". If you read through the "making the accessory" chapter, this part will be familiar to you. If not, well, don't worry, cuz here we go.

Here is what the box will look like, and here's the info I will put into it:

I'll explain stuff real quick about what you put in the default skin box and why.

Default skin is generally the texture that a mesh will read. You put in the exact name of the texture for attachments. If you made a knife and called the .bmp for it "knife" then you would put that exact name in the box.

For this, since the head file name is c533fa_shi the default skin name is c533fa. Don't ask me why it works technically, it just does. This is the part I learned in Jennova's tutorial. If your file name was c345fa_barbie then the default skin name would be c345fa.

Continuing on:

Then I click on "import" to import the OBJ. Next I go back into the menu and select "save as". From there I save it as the same name I wrote in the second box, File Designation, making sure that the little box below the name you type in says it's saving it as an .skn file.

It has now just become a .skn file, and a brand new mesh.

Select your course:

Custom Textures (swimsuits, PJ's, formal, and nudes)
Writing the .cmx file (the head)
Sim Show testing
Game Testing
I'd like to go home now.