Face Topology Practice

franman

Hi I would like to share a face model with you. This is a work of mine about to be ready to be imported to Mudbox. Comments & critiques appreciated.





By franman007 at 2012-02-23


By franman007 at 2012-02-23
By franman007 at 2012-02-23

GragGunslinger

You have a good start here, the general rings around the eyes and mouth are starting to come together, but I think you need to take a second look at how all those loops fit together and work together.

Specifically problem areas are the pole near your brow ridge, and under your jaw, those 2 loops are not gonna be fun to play with in mudbox and are going to give you lots of problems.

The polycount wiki has LOTS of reference, this is one of my favourite references.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80005

franman

Thanx for the advice GragGunslinger I'll see what I can do to fix both these problems.

Also I've been reading a lot on Polycount's Face Topology wiki as well as the Face Topology community breakdown thread in the link you've specified and I've learned a lot. It's good to have feed backs from you guys.

GragGunslinger

You're very welcome!

I hope to see an update soon

franman

Alright so here's an update I hope I did this correctly.

By franman007 at 2012-02-27
By franman007 at 2012-02-27http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/6/angle1a.jpg/
By franman007 at 2012-02-27

Emil Mujanovic

So far you seem to have a pretty solid basemesh to use for sculpting. I would suggest a few fixes (mainly my own personal preference).

RED: Remove these edges because they aren't improving the basemesh, if anything they are making it worse. There are two pinching areas (marked B and C) and you want to try and avoid those if you can.

GREEN: Add in these loops to keep your edgeflow cleaner and easier to work with and also to add a bit more definition around the eyes and mouth. Adding the additional loops around the eyes and mouth aren't necessary by any means, but I personally like to have a bit more geometry in those areas, especially around the eyes. I want to get finer details in there at lower sub division levels.

BLACK: Areas where pinching will occur (A - is okay, you can get away with this or you can decide to terminate the edgeloop further back along the scalp).

franman

Hi it's been awhile but I realize before I export the face mesh to Mudbox, I have to UV unwrap it. I use the pelt method bear in mind I'm using 3Ds Max 2012. I need help in this department so any links as well as comments and critiques are welcome.

Here's my progress:


Not sure if this helps but here's the seams around the mouth:


And finally the UV unwrap:

Neox

for the unwrap you should either - make the checker smaller or unse a different pattern to see whats actually going on, install the textools for instance there a couple of great checkers for unwrapping built in.

franman

I've got a question. My plan was to apply a normal map and apply skin texture to the model. A friend (who is currently working in Gameloft btw) told me that UV Unwrapping is unnecessary. He wasn't 100% sure about applying skin textures requires proper UV unwrapping but we both know that Mudbox does allow painting textures on your model.

So back to the question if I were to export my model to Mudbox do I have to UV unwrap my model first?

Torch

Hi franman, wanted to come check out your post after you mentioned it on mine I would say UVing is required if you want to edit your diffuse/normal maps within a painting package such as Photoshop. With your UV map so far it looks like there's quite a bit of distortion so you may get stretching of the texture when you bake.

If you want to 'auto-UV' your head just to see what it'll look like you can always use UV master or any of the UV tiles settings in ZBrush...although I haven't played around with them too much and don't know if Mudbox has anything like it.

Keep us updated with the progress man!

franman

Hello, it's been awhile but I've been studying some anatomy of the face as well as learning some tutorial vids I learn from Eat 3D (though I wish they touch more on the Mudbox subject for the matter not just Z-brush).

So what I did was fix the topology as best as I could suggested from you guys then I continue digital sculpting using Mudbox and bake the high poly to low poly using Mudbox.

Here's the results:


By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

By franman007 at 2012-04-04

I'm planning on texturing the face in the meanwhile plz comment & critique my work; offer some better suggestions to improve my workflow.

darthwilson

you should easily be able to weld more of your UV together so you get as little seams as possible. Good progress from the 1st image to last though.