For many, the holy grail of 3D character modeling is a good head. Some artists spend as much time, or more, creating and refining character's head as they do on the rest of the body. And, of course, the face consumes the lion's share of this time. This makes sense, because we humans are hard-wired to look at faces, more than, perhaps, any other object in our environment. It naturally follows that an enterprising developer would create a tool specifically for generating and parametrically editing realistic heads, and that's just what Applied Ideas' Ken Maffei has done.

The software is Head Designer, a plug-in for 3ds max distributed by Digimation. This eminently useful tool, which has been around for a while, was so good in its initial incarnation that little has been added in the new version 1.5. Specifically, Ken added four new ethnic head shapes--African-American and Asian in both male and female--and an androgynous eight-year-old child's head suitable for using as a boy or girl (just add hair). Also new are settings for Inward Deformation on the entire head, augmenting the existing Outward Deformation settings, plus some additional controls for eyes and lips.

Besides the new ones noted above, available head shapes include four versions each of Generic Man and Generic Woman; you can switch among the shapes at any time, keeping the existing settings. Once you add a head, it's tempting (and fun) to start playing with the parameters right away, but I recommend instead that you scroll down to the last rollout, Presets/Limit Settings, and try loading some of the presets. These offer a wide range of more-or-less realistic head styles that you can learn from or use as starting points for your own heads, such as Muscle Head, Geek, Mad Scientist, and Exotic. You might even know some of these people! You can also save your own presets. By the way, I also suggest you create a couple of texture-mapped eyeballs when using Head Designer; having eyes in the heads makes a world of difference. I used the nifty procedural eye textures included in Symbiont 2.1, free from Darkling Simulations www.darksim.com/html/download_simbiont2.html.

The heart of Head Designer is its rollouts for the head and its different parts, typically with a dozen or so parameters each. The Head Shape rollout gives you controls for Outward Deformation, which makes the head balloon outward, and Inward Deformation, which squeezes the center of the head, making the top and bottom appear to bulge. Here you also find separate scaling controls for the three axes, plus Skew settings that control taper. There're also width and depth controls for just the front part of the head (also known as the face), flattening the top (or producing a cone-head effect), and setting the forehead slope.

Next we come to the most prominent facial feature: the nose. Aren't noses silly? Head Designer lets you make them even sillier with controls such as Width, Length, and Pull Up (sets the vertical position). You can also make the bridge convex or concave, and give the end a pug or hook style.

Head Designer's chin controls let you stick it out or push it in, set the tilt and width, and adjust the jaw width. Cheekbones have a marked effect on the overall look of the face, and the software lets you determine how far they stick out, and their vertical position. You can also adjust the cheeks' curvature for a range of looks between hollow-cheeked ascetic and full-pouched human hamster.

The eyes have it: controls for separation of the sockets, vertical position, depth position (inset/bulge), and brow bulge. You can also set rotation about the in-out axis, and roundedness for the top and bottom. These latter controls don't let you fully close the eyes, but you can take them between shocked and squinty-eyed expressions. And if you've ever wanted to make a human Dumbo, the ear controls let you produce a fairly convincing replica. Mouth controls include protrusion, width, and thickness for the upper and lower lips. There are no controls for smiling or frowning; in fact, Head Designer doesn't offer any controls specifically related to facial expressions. It's strictly for defining the structure of the head.

The heads are quite detailed, down to the little nubbins on the inside corners of the eyes and in front of the ear holes, and look good enough for close-up rendering. You can animate all the settings, but there's no provision for speaking. If you want to accomplish the latter, use bones or morphing. They're fairly high in resolution, upwards of 5,000 faces each, but using max's MultiRes modifier to reduce the face count to 10 to 20 percent of the original, depending on the head shape, still results in a fairly convincing-looking head. If you need to go much lower than that, for a real-time application, say, you're probably better off mapping face textures onto boxes. The heads are bottomless, ready for attaching to a body or torso's open neck by welding verts.

Head Designer comes with a "crowd" utility to generate up to 100 randomized heads at a time, plus a well-written manual with suggestions for how to use the different settings. It's not a comprehensive solution for character modeling and animation, but it's a darn good head start (sorry, couldn't resist). I recommend Head Designer highly for 3ds max users who need to model generic-looking (or very strange-looking) virtual humans on a tight deadline.