Part 5 A Nose By Any Other Name

The nose used to be my second least favorite part of modeling the head, but that's because I used to do it rather half haphazardly and I'd have to spend forever afterwords trying to fix the mess I'd made. Fortunately I got it down to a fairly straight forward process which I have demonstrated for you below.

A more detailed outline is beneath the video.

Details

• Select the edge on the tip of the nose
• From the front view, extrude this edge and pull it to right - not the widest part of the nose, but just to the left of that. From the side view, move it to the base of the nose.
• Snap the bottom vertex of the extruded edge to the hanging vertex we left after making the rings around the mouth way back in Part 2. Adjust the top vertex to match the image planes.
• Insert an edge loop in the middle of the face. This will become the side of the nostril. Move it into place in the front view and then in the side view. You may need to add more edges to better match the shape of the nose.
• Use the Append Polygon Tool to attach the side of the nostril to the profile.
• I plan on taking this into ZBrush eventually, so I want to minimize the number of triangles and stretched polygons. I ended up with both of them here, so I added another edge loop across these new faces and adjusted the vertices to even things out.
• Now that I have the general shape of the nose I can begin looking for ways to eventually connect it with the geometry around the eye. You may need to add or remove edges to the nose.
• If there are vertices in the nose close enough to the eye geometry that you can snap on to the other, do so, otherwise we'll have to wait a few steps to connect that geometry.
• Merge the vertex that you snapped from the nose to the mouth loop earlier and use Append Polygon Tool to fill in the area around the nostril.
• Select the new faces, extrude, and scale down to match the nostril. Extrude them into the nose. Some people leave this step out if they're taking this into ZBrush, but I prefer to do it here.
• Soften edges, freeze transformations, and delete history.
• Display face normals for both pieces of geometry. If the normals point inwards for either, reverse them and delete history again.
• Combine both meshes and delete history again. Always delete history before and after you combine meshes. If you don't weird stuff can happen later.
• Merge any vertices you were able to snap from the nose to the eye geometry.
• It's easier to see if there are any obvious problems with your head if you can look at it with both sides, so every now and then I duplicate and flip it across the X Axis by setting the X Scale to negative one. If nothing jumps out at you, then delete the extra half and go back to the original.
• Append the edges between the profile and the eye geometry.
• Append the edges between the eyes and the mouth.
• Insert edge loops as needed to match these new faces to the side of the nose.
• Snap and merge vertices.
• Adjust the geometry flesh out the cheek.
• Soften edges and delete history again.