How to make an Anime head in 3ds max Part-1
Posted by Danny Jensen in 
Welcome to another one of my tutorials,
this time i will show you, probably my favorite and quite possibly the easiest way to make an anime head from scratch.
First off we will need a head that has a front view and a side view. For now i sketched up quick head, i know its not super great but it will work for now lol. Also its a good idea to make the background a non white color as it can be hard to see the edges of the model in 3dsmax when we apply this image to the background
Front view
Side view
Ok now that we have a front and side view we need to set these images as our viewport background in 3ds max. So if you select the Front viewport so that its highlighted you can go to the menu and select Views >> Viewport Background
One the next window you want to select your front view image of your anime head and set it int he background using the same settings as the image below.
Now do the same for the side view. Once you have an image in both views we can start building the face.
Now we are going to create a flat plane to use to construct the face. So go ahead and in the create tab click on Plane and set the Length and Width segs to 12. Now just draw the plane over the face in Front view.
Now we want to chop this plane down the middle and make one side a reference so we only have to model one side of the face. So in the modify tab right click plane and convert to edit mesh. Next expand edit mesh then select vertex. Now highlight half of the vertices and remove them.
Now we need to mirror the remaining piece and set it as a reference. So click the mirror tool and choose reference.
Good, now that we have our reference set up we can start adjusting the vertices to look like the face in the front view.
Try to move them to keep feature points on the face.
Before
After
All i really did here was reposition all the vertices to line up to the facial features, however this may not be enough so we may need to use the cut tool just to refine more areas. Since we have the general shape now adding a bit more detail wont be so hard. So if you expand the edit mesh modifier click on face. Scroll down the rollout menu and look for the cut button and activate it.
So for starters i am going to refine the nose. So i take the cut tool and cut through different faces to make the nose a bit more high poly.
Before cut
After Cut
Now i am going to do the same for the mouth to define the lips. And then again to define the eye shape
That should be adequate, i didnt want to go over board with detail as we still have to pull out each vertex to create the depth of the face. A couple tricks i learned when doing this is to apply the drawn face texture to the plane as well as create an eyeball for reference before we start creating depth.
So first thing would be to do is to uvmap the face, by adding the UVW Map modifier to this plane and making sure its planar mapped.
