Step-5 Facial Features

this is roughly what we are after.
- For facial features we will setup the geometry to define where the nose,eyes, and mouth will lie. First. use connect to define eyebrows, and the nose.
- second we use connect on a few edges to isolate a face where the eye will be. so we can either inset or extrude inwards later. also you will need a muscle that will run down from the nose , and around the mouth. so connect a few edges. but. as you notice. you cant use connect on the nose part because the part you want to choose is a vertex. so right click on the vertex icon ( so it activates the collection mode ) choose 2 verticies. and press connect.
- add more edges going from the nose and mouth. and dissolve that blue segment just for the sake of keeping it all quads. speaking of quads, there is a large triangle near the mouth. so lets get rid of it by using another connect neat the mouth.
- now that we have enough polys for the main features. we should move the points into the right places.

- so now we got the setup to actually add in the features. we can use several methods of adding them in. to expose you more to the tools ill show you 2 ways of going about this. first take that big fat poly that makes the eye. bring up the menu and choose "Inset". this will make one poly inside another. the new poly should be selected. if by any chance its not. then select it, and move the poly a little wee back so theres a little eye socket. ( Note: Normally i make the eyesocket squar-ish so that the eye will fit in easier. but for the purpose of this character having squinty looking eyes, i chose to make the socket more rectangular.)
- after thats done lets put in some indication of a mouth. first pick the mouth polygon that we will put in. then bring up the menu.while there. we want to put in the mouth directly on the Z axis. so what we will do is right click once again. but this time on extrude. this should bring up a menu asking which axis you want to use. so left click on Z and then extrude this until you get a nice hole in the mouth. as you can see there is a line there now from the top lip to the bottom lip.and a polygon that sits in the middle of the mouth. to delete this polygon. just select the edge that is connecting the upper and lower lip. and press dissolve.
- Next is the nose. pick the three polys that will define the nose. then bring up the menu and right click on "extrude region". ( note unlike the normal extrude function. extrude region keeps the faces together. this goes for every tool that has the region name. ) once again. we want to use the Z axis. so left click on that. the nose doesnt really look like a nose because of the top portion just looking like its sticking out. pick the 2 edges that connect the tip of the top portion of the nose. and press collapse. from there you can move the edge back a little.

- Because the Virtual Mirror is..physically not there, it means that when you did the extrude region for the nose it didnt leave the Virtual Mirrored face as 1 piece. Instead it extruded out of the faces that you chose and kept them whole. To fix this, first get into body mode ( "b" ) and bring up the menu. From there what we will do is hide the Vrtual Mirrored half so we can investigate any problem areas. To do this Middle click on Virtual Mirror.
- Rotate your view until you clearly see the cross-section polygon. As you can see, the nose should have a few unwanted edges/polygons that will affect the way the VM works. to get rid of this mess, select every face that is on that plane, and then press merge region. This should merge every polygon into one. so all those edges that you seen before should have dissapeared.
- While we have the virtual mirror hidden, lets work a little bit on the inside of the mouth. First pick the back polygon in the inside of the mouth, and extrude it two times on the Z axis. After your done with the extrusions, dissolve the unwanted edges that are connecting the top to bottom of the inside of the mouth. Then pick the 4 points that are illustrated in the image below. and scale them up a little bit until the inside of the mouth apears a more rounded. Switch to polygon selection mode ( "f" ) and pick the middle polygon on the side of the mouth. and scale it up as well.
- Lets clean up the inside of the mouth to have a more presentable appearance and at the same time, make it easier for us to edit when we are inside it. Press "2" to get into tweak-move mode. Get into an orthographic side-view by pressing "X" ( if you didnt enable the temp ortho in the preferences at the beginning of the turorial then just press P to put the viewport into an orthographic view. ). Now just edit the point until you got the desired shape.
* (tip: while in tweak mode, to make it easier on yourself you do not need to actually left click to select the points/elements, and then right click to move. commands in mirai can be executed on whatever is highlited, without actually having to select the element. so just try it. highlight the element, and right click. This only works on single elements though, for obvious reasons. )