This month we'll discuss modeling with MetaReyes in 3D Studio MAX. If you don’t have MetaReyes you can use any metaball plug in. There are even free ones on the Internet. The only major difference as far as this tutorial is concerned is the fact that you might only have spheres to work with which would take a little longer. The principles discussed still apply. 
       If you have never made metaballs before I would suggest spending some time creating and deleting some until you are able to create the shape you are going for. You’re only going to need eleven different metaballs. You’ll be placing thirty nine altogether but they will be resized copies of these eleven.  As you can see there are no complicated shapes involved at all. Also remember that they don’t have to be exact. You’ll never make two faces that look exactly the same. 

Metaball one (front view)         

  (Left view) 
 

  This is the main head shape. I’ll describe how to make the first shape in detail. Click on;                            create geometry/ REM PRIMITIVES/MetaReyes. Click and drag a little in the front view while looking in the left view. The first drag sets the diameter of the bottom of the shape. Click and drag slightly a second time to make the shape less round. If you want the shape to be bigger at one end you would drag again. The first ball doesn’t require it so you would just click. That click finishes that section of the ball. The next click determines how long the ball is. You want the second shape pretty close to the first or your head will be too long. To finish the ball you’ll repeat some steps. Click and drag until it is slightly bigger than the first shape, click and drag slightly, click, then right click to finish the ball. It is hard to judge if you have it right or not until you are done so it may take several tries. You may do a lot of deleting and starting over before you get good at it. You don’t have to be perfect. It is simple to fix the overall shape of the head when you’re done making it. Here is what you did to make the first ball. 
 
1. Click and drag (sets the diameter of the bottom of the shape) 
2. Click and drag slightly (make the profile less round) 
3. Click (dragging would make one end of the profile fatter) 
4. Click (dragging would rotate the profile) 
5. Click (finishes that profile) 
6. Click and drag very slightly (sets length of the metaball) 
7. Click and drag a circle bigger than first.(set size of second profile) 
8. Repeat 2 
9. Repeat 3 
10. Repeat 4 
11. Right click (finishes metaball) 

       At that point your metaball should appear. If it looks sort of head shaped you are ready to go on, if not just delete it and try again. Now create the other ten metaballs. First set the color to the same as the picture. This determines how soft the ball is or in other words how much it blends with others. Colors to the right of the fusion strength tool bar will subtract matter from the ball and colors to the left adds matter. Looking at the two views, create a metaball that is similar. Size is more important than shape. You can uniform scale the metaball to make it match the picture. MetaReyes treats a non-uniform scale like a uniform one. Remember that you must click the MetaReyes button each time you start a new metaball and you right click to finish. You’ll notice that some balls such as the ears and lip valley are different than the others. They have an extra profile. To make these you just create three profiles instead of two before right clicking. Remember to save often. 
        When you have the metaballs made you can begin to place them on your Main head ball.    

                                 

Using the standard scale, rotate, and transform tools, match your metaballs to those in the picture.  

Be sure they are oriented correctly in both views.  

Hopefully you can tell where duplications of metaballs are used. For instance, the smaller eyebrow ball is a scaled down version of the bigger one. To create it you simply select the first one, and making sure that the transform button is on, hold “shift” and drag. The clone dialog box will appear. You will want to select “copy” and click enter. Then you can scale and place it where it belongs. Another duplication is the bigger eye socket ball which is a smaller version of the cheek ball. Notice that you only have to hang the balls on one side of the face. You can mirror clone those to make the other side. The only balls that will not be cloned are the two that makeup the bridge of the nose and the main head ball. After you get a few features hung, if you get anxious to see what it will look like, you can skip to the next step and then return to metaball placement. 

          When you get half the face hung including the nose you will want to see how it looks. Before it can render the balls must be grouped. Click on Utilities (the hammer)/more/ and MetaReyes Utilities. Select Muscle Grouping and then click on select model. Click on any metaball and they all become selected. Click on Make Group and then hit the quick render button. It probably doesn’t look right. Several balls may need to be moved in or out, up or down. Work on one feature at a time and perfect it before moving on to the next. If the eyebrow is too big move it in a little and hit render. If you want higher cheek bones move the cheek balls up. When you are happy with how it looks you can use clone to make the other half of the face. Select just the balls that are missing on the other side of the face. Click the Mirror button and the fly out appears. Make sure that it is set to “x-axis” and to “copy” and then hit enter. All the new balls are selected and ready to move over into place. 
         Whenever you add a ball you must regroup in order to be able to render and there are some important steps added to the process. Go to Utilities again and click select model. Click on any ball and “group 00” appears in the box. Click on that and then click on ungroup. Click yes to the question in the fly out that appears. Click on select model again and select any ball. Now they all become selected. Click on Make Group.  Now you can render. Both sides of the head are there now. You may have to move the new balls a little if they aren’t perfectly placed. It was about at this point on mine that some strange polygon tearing appeared above the chin. If that happens don’t worry. When you convert it to a mesh it’s not there. Next we will make it into a mesh. 
        Click on the mesh generation panel if it isn’t already open. Under Mesh Name type in a name for your head. Click on the Mesh Generation button and a mesh is created. With everything but the mesh selected go to the display panel and click on hide selected. I would save again at this point. If the overall shape of the head is too long or square or something don’t worry we will fix that. Now you can work with the mesh with an uncluttered scene. I would save to a new file name, maybe with the word mesh in it somewhere. 
        Next let us give it a quick skin texture. First we will have to apply a UVW Map modifier to it. Go to the modify panel and click on UVW Map. Click on spherical and then click on fit below that. Go to the material editor and browse for a skin material. If your library doesn’t have one see if it has a standard one called flesh. This is a gruesome looking material but it can be converted quickly to a fairly decent skin. Change the diffuse color to a flesh tone and lower the diffuse map amount to ten. Click on the diffuse map and set both numbers under tiling to 26. Click the assign to object button and render it. I didn’t go with realistic skin on mine. I gave mine a rusty steel texture. It’s all up to you. You can collapse your modifier stack at this point if you are happy with your material mapping. 
         If you want to change the shape of the head you can do that with a FFD modifier. In the modify panel click on more. Click on FFD 4x4x4 and then on sub-object. Now you can select control points and move them to reshape the head. When you’re done you can collapse the stack if you’re sure you like what you’ve changed. We’ll use a similar modifier to add some minor facial animation . 
        Here is how to make the mouth and eyebrows move. This technique is more quick than it is beautiful. First add an edit mesh modifier. In sub-object mode, select faces instead of vertices. In the left view select all the faces below the upper lip. 

Be careful not to get any of the upper lip faces. Now click on more and select a 2x2FFD modifier. Click on the animate button and move the slider a few frames. Select all the control points and move them down a little. You can’t go very far with this technique before the illusion is spoiled but you can make it look like a talking head. Move the slider ten frames forward and move the control points back. Add a few more mouth openings and closings. 
          Next we will move the eyebrows the same way. Add another edit mesh modifier to the stack. Now we can deselect all the faces by clicking outside the mesh and select the eyebrow region. Your mesh should have a higher density of polygons in the face area and fewer elsewhere. Select the dense region all the way up to the first row of bigger polygons. Things should move smoother this way. For this I just selected the front of the face not all the way to the back of the head. Now add another 2x2FFD modifier to the stack and animate those control points as you did for the mouth. Render the animation. Despite the fact that this looks ten times better than anything I’ve modeled using other modeling techniques, a head made and animated this quickly does not really stand up to close scrutiny. For this head I suggest maybe a weird monster texture or something else instead of real human skin. You might keep him in partial shadow or fog. But, if you can do all this in one evening think of what you can do in three nights with MetaReyes. Another thing to remember is that now that you have the metaballs made you can make a different head in a few minutes. Keep the scene with the original balls in place as a head-making machine. If you want a female head, for instance, move the balls a little to make different facial features. This only scratches the surface of what you can do with MetaReyes but it is an introduction.