Reference Plates

To begin modelling, I need the front and side views of my face, these photos are taken by Richard Barnes, then I use Photoshop to edit the photos.

Choose Filter, Distort and Lens Correction, to correct the photos, so I can remove distortion or change the vertical and horizontal perspective, so the face looks more like it is facing the center. After I have done this to both photos, I drag the side photo into the front, so they are in one file, then I line them up by using free transform and ruler to guide me.

Topology lines

To highlight the key areas of the face, I will need to use the brush tool and set to 3px, the wrinkles are the point to start, I use the brush tool to draw each wrinkle, so I can easily tell the details of my face, and then I change the colour of the brush and set the size to 2px. Using the lines I have drawn already as a guild line, I begin to draw quads on the face. At this stage I need to make sure every poly have 4 lines and there should be no triangles, then save the file as face.

Reference setup

Open 3ds max and create a plane with 1 length and width segs. Open material editor, click on diffuse none, bitmap to apply the face.psd file. Go to the modifier panel and from the drop down list apply UVW map bitmap, click fit. Then use the gizmo to move the front face to the center.

In the material editor, increase the value of colour to 100, so the photo looks bright even from the side.

To create the side view reference plates, I select the rotate tool, hold down shift and rotate the image to 90 degree then click u tile flip. Select gizmo again to move the size view image to the center.