Tips for modelling a head for animation?

mistasierra

No sculpting yet, just plain old modeling. I'm having a bit of a hard time modeling her mouth to get the shape I want while making sure there's not too many polygons and retaining loops. 

Any good professional approved modeling tutorials for animation? Thanks

Alex_J

There is a lot existing professionally made models you can check out for free to help get a better idea of what people have done in various situations. Zbrush comes with some base meshes, I believe Maya has some in the content browser under windows > general editors. Unity gives out a free model called "animation guy" which is more stylized with a big face and eyes and lots of geo on the face for detailed expressions. 

Look's like you've got the right idea more or less. Obviously the less geometry you have, the less detailed animations you'll be able to support. What you don't want as a beginner is to get caught up with some speculations you might have about "what is too much topology" or whatever. The only right answer is "what's the best solution for your exact problem," and you just have to do lots of work and experiment to build the experience to make those judgement calls. 

So for instance, you may take what you've got here, then go and learn a bit about facial rigging -- at least enough to retarget a premade rig onto your model, and then run some animations with it. 

This sounds like a lot of work -- learning all these different things so you can test shit out for yourself -- and it is and it will probably have you pulling your hair a few times, but it's the only way short of hiring a tutor to build real understanding (IMO.)

I would say, unless you are building for a mobile game, you could probably double or triple the amount of geometry here and be fine for any PC game which would need facial animations. Just be sure to continue working with clean loops so that you can drop more in easily if you need, and also with high deformation area's like the mouth and cheeks, try to match the flow of the polygons to the way the would skin would fold and bend. 

Lot's of nice examples like this on artstation: