Mirror Geometry.

So I finished Modeling half my geometry, the next step was to mirror it so I have a full Body. It sounds like an easy step, but this was the hardest thing I've had to do in this project yet.

I followed the instructions in the book i bought, by using the mirror geometry tool. However when i used it, the vertices in the centre of the mouth pinched together. The book warned that this could happen and the only way to fix it was to either play with the mirror geometry settings or to move the verts at the centre of the mouth further away from each other. I tried both of these however and for some reason it just didn't work.

So then I asked Steve and he told me to d

uplicate the mesh, flip it on the origin and merge the vertices. However I got the same results, pinching in the centre of the mouth. He then reminded me to check all the centre verts were snapped to the origin. So I went through them all and sure enough, some were not. So after fixing this problem I went back to trying to do it the book way. Yet again the Mouth verts pinched and it did the same trying it Steve's way again. I looked it up on the internet to see if others were having the same problem and found it was quite a common problem. But the only way of overcoming this was to keeping playing with the mesh.

So after a few days of trying with the same results, I got quite annoyed and was about ready to scrap the mouth all together. But In one last attem

pt I played with maya, experimenting with other ways to combine separate meshes. First I duplicates the Mesh and flipped it on the origin, then i tried combining the mesh. This worked and the mesh became one, however the central verts from both meshes still existed so I had a strange seam. So I tried merging the verts and it worked. So FINALLY after possible one of the most horrible week long set backs I have had in this pro

ject, I had a complete mesh. And despite loosing a week to this I couldn't help but feel incredibly proud.

So the last thing to do in this step was tweak the geometry as after mirroring it looked a little too fat and not very organic, especially on the head.