I am a high-school student that has been using 3ds Max 5 for the past six months or so. I have a lot to learn as far as modeling goes, but I have some links that you may find useful.

--Go here for a 3ds Max 7 trial
--A very awesome 3ds Max texturing/modeling tutorial.
--3d Total

Those will be good to get you started. I highly recommend using 3ds max. You can learn a lot during those 30 trial days, and if your trial runs out, you could always scrounge up a 3ds Max 5 or 6 tutorial somewhere.

I have some images of models I've made. I do environments/furniture/so on in school, but I find them boring. Character modeling is where it's at.

I'm first year and my instructor has absolutely no clue what he is doing, so bear with me. I still have a very long way to go.

The one on the bottom is far from done. Very far. Haha. The top two were done within my first month or so of learning to use the program.




So yes. Modeling is fun. I very much hope to go to college for it.

well.. i had got a computer magazine CD (chip india) where they gave blender with a couple of video tutorials and also had an article in the mag how to get started....
i think blender has a really nice interface and is easy to use.. ofcourse i had some small experience in CAD before this so that helped..
i think blender has a site (maybe blender.org or blender3d.org ) where there are forums where u can ask for more help and get tutorials.

Wow, those are very nice!!! You're either learning very fast, or your instructor's really great. Or both. The hair's really realistic. Did you use multiple maps for the first two?

The lighting's a bit too much though... Too much light reflecting on the face makes it blinding and unseeable, unless you want that effect...

Yup - Blender is program with nice features... There are many tutorials, It's best to start at [Official Blender Tutorials] and yup amkint: - both at [Blender.org] there is project page, where you can read news and annoucments, and at [Blender3D.org] there is page, where you can find in using blender and download, there is also a GREAT gallery... [Official Blender Gallery] - just try it

My instructor has no idea at all what he is doing haha. For the first two, I used only a basic material for the hair with a very high Noise map - no personalized maps textured in an image editing program at all. The bottom one I textured the hair and eyes for, and at this point in time have only used one map for each. Top layers of the hair will have their own map.

I was going for the blinding effect. I enjoy forcing people to focus on the key areas of a face - eyes, lips, how the hair falls around and frames it. Here's one without the lighting:



At that point in time I had not attached the two halves of the head, which is why there's a nice bulky line right down the center of the face haha.

I like cinema 4d it works really well

Hmm. Do you prefer to use symetry for attaching the two halves? Or mirror? I like symetry, it usually makes it more rounded.

Bryce is a very ideal 3d modeling program for beginners. You could create and edit 3d landscapes terrains and artworks here in a breeze. Bryce though isnt actually a figure or modelling software.

I also used symetry... but remember about such thing like putting it under meshsmooth... I also heard (not confirmed) that it is useful to put betwean symetry and meshsmooth a turn to poly... so modifier stack would look like this:

Mesh Smooth
Turn to poly
Symetr
Editable Mesh / Poly / Whatever

probably you would get slight better result, at symetry line, if not, just pull back some points and it would look a lot better... just don't move them in other axis, but for sure you already know that

After I've gotten a little bit done on one half of the face, I apply a meshsmooth modifier to it and just copy one half of the face as an instance and mirror it. I weld the two halves together vertex by vertex down the middle after it looks how I want it to.

I enjoy being tedious.