A² IS DOING 3D! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!

Wow I'm quite impressed with the MeshSmooth Modifier! I should read a paper on its technique.

Is this guy asian? He seems to have asian features. It looks really good.

In 3ds Max MeshSmooth just iteratively tessellates the model and smooths the normals out (retaining smoothing groups), it has some extra controls that allow for weighted smoothing of original vertices, maintaining creases at edge extremes but yeah, it's a pretty simple modifier. TurboSmooth does basically the same thing faster if you don't need any of the advanced stuff, and tbh that model looks like it has enough polys to where you could get a good result from just editing/smoothing the normals without subdividing it any more.

Decent looking face, I would change the triangulation on the quads between the nose and the cheek so that they're concave instead of poofed out though

despite being housed within the same Autodesk bosom for the last few years Maya and Max are still different tools with very different interfaces and strengths/weaknesses and will probably stay that way for several more iterations at least

Really depends on what you want to use a 3D modeling/animation suite for, as well as a good amount of personal preference. I've been using it since version 7 and I find it to be pretty rad for lots of low-med poly modeling, texturing, keyframe animation and even things up to and including baking normal maps, lightmaps and stuff (for some reason very few people I know are even aware that 3ds Max can do this and often switch to ZBrush or something to do it in, but it's pretty easy to set up in Max and the results are just as nifty). My main concern is with creating game assets. If I was looking for something to do more high poly/cinematic/scripted animation type stuff then Maya would be a no-brainer for me. Either program works in either scenario though and Maya seems to have been gaining popularity among the gaming crowd for years now.

also personally I found Maya's interface to be pretty clunky and needlessly obfuscated when I was learning it; Maya and I get along fine now but I find 3DS Max to be a lot more direct and a closer mapping to my understanding of how 3D graphics work :p

And for those of us who don't have a down payment on a car to spend there's Blender which is just as capable as anything.


Just hard to use.

You and Van Gogh share something in common.

I've never actually modeled features on the head before, I would just draw them on the texture like you've seen in many PS2-era games. Looks just as good so long as you don't zoom in so much, so it's great for over-the-shoulder games where you usually aren't looking eye-to-eye with anyone else.