MODELLING AN ORGANIC FORM

01 ADD A SPHERE

To begin, add a sphere as a child of a symmetry object, so that you have a reference to work around. This is a useful technique to adopt even for non-human creatures, as it helps define the shapes correctly early on in the process. Once you finally have your eyeballs firmly in place, go to a front view and activate the polygon pen.

02 work on the Details

Using the polygon pen, change its mode to quad strip in the attributes, then plot out the curve of the upper eyelid, click for each point of your four-sided polygons. This is a fast method for laying out quick shapes. Do the same for the bottom eyelid, leaving a gap between the two. Try to make the faces fairly even.

03 bring Polygons FORWARD

The next thing you’ll want to do is bring the polygons forward from world center so they are in the right place and then select the centre polygons and move them forward, so that they sit around the shape of the eyeball. You can do them one at a time or alternatively use soft selections to help you achieve a smooth falloff. Once you are happy with what you’ve created, use the bridge tool to connect the upper and lower eyelids.

04 final touches

From here on in it’s all about refining. Start by adding a loop all round the eye, so you can curve the eyelids over the sphere. Putting the mesh into a subd is good idea, so you can switch the smoothing to check progress. Once you are happy with the lids, you can select the outer edges and extrude new faces to turn into cheeks and forehead, and so on. Don’t forget to add it to a symmetry object to refine your proportions.