Preparation

To begin creating my own face in 3DSmax I first had to photograph my portrait from the front and the side. These were taken at the highest resolution possible.
The photos would then be imported into Photoshop to edit and prepare for modeling.

I had to use the Lens Correction filter tool within Photoshop to straighten out the front and side view portraits of my face so that key features of my face, such as the eyes and mouth, matched up when one image was placed over the other.

The next step was to go over the front and side views and draw in the general shape and the contours of my face. I did this part in blue.

With the blue lines filled in around the face I could then draw in red the quads that would build up the polygons in my face. When drawing the quads its useful to not draw too many as it could become overly complicated and very difficult to manipulate the polygons later on. Also it is important to not have any three sided 'quads' as this will lead to problems with attaching and creating the surface of the face later on

This stage is quite important as the quads are used to build the profile of the face. Drawing these at such an early stage helps when it comes to modeling as we can use the photo as a background and sketch the red quads with the Line tool in 3DSmax.

Once I had completed drawing the quads I imported the image into 3DSmax and applied the image as a texture to a plane. The image first appeared very pixelated and squashed so fix this I applied a UVWmap to the plane and then was able to click Bitmap Fit which reverted the image to its normal coordinates. Under the UVWmap modifier there is an option called Gizmo which allowed me to move the image along the plane to have either the front or side view of my face visible on the plane.

I shift clicked to make a copy of the plane, moved it to the side and rotated it 90 degrees. Under the Gizmo selection I then moved the image to display the side profile of my face instead of the front. I also flipped the image horizontally so my face was pointing the right way.

To fix the pixelation I had to configure the graphics driver under 3DSmax customize options panel. The default resolution for importing images was at a low 256, so I changed it to automatically detect the resolution of the image.

I selected both planes and 'Froze' them to stop me from accidentally selecting the images whilst modeling the surface of the face.

The scene is now set to begin creating the surface of the face.