I was looking at my model for the TKD Guy project, the whole scene, and it occurred to me that while it is really cool to be able to build and put everything in the one scene, after a while it can get a bit crowded and make it a little difficult to work. I really learned this with the offic project. I realized that it might be smarter to build the bigger, more important and focal items in a separate file and then import them in.
With that idea in mind, I decided the mannequin for the TKD Guy would be the a good candidate to try this with. It’s going to take some work to get it proportioned right and I am already aware of the proportions being badly off. I was just blocking things in so I am not worried about it. But looking at all the pieces I have already put together, I didn’t want to start from nothing in a new file. So I decided to investigate if I could export just
that part out of the one file and into another file.
When I first opened the file with the mannequin and the studio in it, before I selected anything else, I marquee selected all of the mannequin. Then I went to the 3DS menu. First I looked at export, and there is an option to export selected, but it exports to a non-native, not 3DS Max, format. I could do that but it’s not really what I want. So I looked at the Save AS option. There is an option to save selected into a new 3DS Max file of its own. Awesome! So that’s what I did.
Sure enough the first file closed, the new file opened and I had just my mannequin with all the pieces there with the names they were given and all on the default layer since I hadn’t moved them yet. Not bad for an early morning.
With my new working space, it feels much easier to zoom in to work on things. I first noticed that I had put all the spheres in at 90 degrees off from what I wanted. It is a little easier for me, in this context to have the poles at the top and bottom instead of the side or front. So I selected each of the spheres and rotated them 90 degrees to fix that. It was early, I don’t remember which axis that was across.
With that fixed, and having a little more time before I needed to start on the rest of my day, I decided to start on the head. Because the human head is not perfectly round, the mannequins’ heads are not perfectly round, they are like our, a bit elongated. To do this I used the edge selection and selected the bottom half of the head sphere and moved it down roughly to how long I thought it should be. Then, with that same set of edges selected I used the scale tool and scaled it in the x and y directions uniformly. The worked to make it look a little like a wide ice cream cone with a scoop of ice cream on top. Which is a rough idea of the shape I was going for, though not too pointy at the bottom.
Doing this required and adustement of a ring or two of edges. I found that I was able to select the whole edge loop and then move it up and it smoothed out the transitions much better.
I also removed a couple of the edge loops at the bottom. This area still looked like the bottom side of a ball and I wanted to flatten it out but the extra loops were going to be unnecessary. So I selected the edge loops and then used the remove option for the edges. Unfortunately this technique leaves behind the points and that doesn’t make for any easy to edit model. So I had to switch to point selection mode and remove all of the orphaned points. Now it was looking good.
Next up select the bottom edge loop and move it up even with the next edge loop to flatten things out. Ok. I did have to adjust the scale of the bottom half again. Still int he x and y axis. Just a little tighter is what it needed. And of course the coresponding repositioning of some edge loops farther up. And that seemed to do it.
A quick look in the perspective window and the bottom part of the head was a little more rounded than I wanted. This part should have a crisper edge to it. Easy to remedy. I added an edge loop there close to the bottom and got what I was wanting.
Here you can see a close up of the head so far. There is still some work to do on it but this may suffice for the scale and proportions of the rest of the model so I may move on and come back to finer details later.
This is a full view of the model now. You can’t really tell that rotated the spheres. In this view it has little impact. For the modeling on the head, it had quite a bit of impact. And as you can see there is still a lot of work to be done.