PART 1: MODELING THE OVERALL SHAPE OF THE CORTEX

To get an object that was as low-res as possible I decided to use a two step process. First I modeled the basic shape of the brain. Then I used the solid drill command to drill the wrinkle lines onto the brain shape. I then used the points from the drill operation to recreate the brain as a subpatch cage.

STEP 1

The first step was to figure out how to make the wrinkles on the brain surface. I drew a rough cross section of a brain, using the pen tool. I made various kinds of kinks to form the folds of the brain. Extruding the shape and deleting the front and back faces gave me a simple cage that I could use to work out the best placement for points.

The fold type marked with the arrow is the one I chose to use. It has two control points at the bottom of the wrinkle and two at the top that cross each other. This gave a nice tight wrinkle.
Move the cursor over the image to see the Sub Patch version.

STEP 2

Using a digital camera, I photographed a model brain. I cropped these pictures in Photoshop and imported them into Modeler as background images. It helps to create a box that is the correct size and proportion as the template images. You can then use the Automatic Size adjustment button to fit the template images to
the box.

STEP 3

Modeling the gross shape.

STEP 4

Starting the lobe. The upper left panel shows a failed attempt to create a UV map as I went along. The end of this tutorial discusses creating a spherical UV map for this shape.

STEP 5

Shaping the lobe.

STEP 6

The basic shape of the brain cortex done.