Creating The Face - Splining The Face

To start actually creating the face in 3D studio max I needed to use a technique called spline, this is done by accessing the line tool under the shapes tab, after this I need to make sure all the correct settings are selected, these settings include setting up the snap tool to vertex from grid points and also making sure the line tool is set to corners.

Once the line tool has been selected I needed to full screen the front facing reference plane and zoom in, this allowed me to get a good view of what I was doing, once ready I started to draw using the line tool, using the topology as a guideline I had to go round the edges, making sure I created quads and that each one closed, this is essentially creating polygons which I can then manipulate at a later date.

The image above shows my face after I had finished splining, though it is quite hard to see, the white lines show the quads I made. This process was quite tedious as I needed to make sure I went over every line of my topology and checking that every quad was closed and to I also found it quite difficult to make sure that there werent any triangle as this would affect my model later.

The next thing I needed to do was to create the actual polygons, this is a simple step as all I did was select one of the objects, right click and click convert to editable poly, this gives you a "surface", the image above, which I then attached to the other objects by selecting the little options box next to attach and highlighting all of the other objects I had just created, the image below shows the full topology of my polygons.