As part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Entertainment Technology curriculum, Introduction to Maya is an elective course where students learn and practice the fundamentals of three-dimensional modeling in Autodesk Maya (2014).

Timeframe: February 2014 (1 week completion time)

The following was our second assignment (and my first ever 3D organic model): to pick a human(oid) head and build it in Maya. I used the following reference images for my model:

I started with a plane that I cut into 2 pieces, then pulled in the right vertex of the cutting edge to the cheekbone. Afterwards I modeled the face using proper edgeflow and mirrored it.

I then extruded the face edges to sculpt out a three-dimensional skull, initially including allotted surface area for hair, and created eyes.

Finally I compressed the shape to reflect the skull as opposed to the original hair. I then created ears and filled the sockets I had left for them in the skull.