Avoiding Mouth Poles On Head Retopo? Will It Affect Sculpting?

Deqa

Is there any way to avoid this mouth pole when doing a retopo on a DynaMesh head from zBrush? It's producing some odd pinching!

First image is my sculpt's retopo and the pinching it produces in zBrush, especially when subdivided (which I plan to do in zBrush for a detail pass). Rest are examples from the Polycount Wiki & zBro's base mesh. 

The question is, if I'm going to sculpt on this via layers in zBrush and subdivs, is this really a problem that will produce pinching? It looks like there's pinching on the shader. My mouth poles aren't as high as the other base meshes and I noticed that I have a lot of divisions coming from the ears and under the nostrils. Not sure if that will cause problems as well for sculpting, too.

Farfarer

Generally speaking, no.

Especially with faces, you'll almost always wind up with a couple of pairs of poles. The trick is arranging the topology so that they get placed where they do the least harm to the surface shading/deformation.

You can see on the wiki image, they've been moved further up and out of the way of the mouth.

Deqa

Farfarer said:

Generally speaking, no.

Especially with faces, you'll almost always wind up with a couple of pairs of poles. The trick is arranging the topology so that they get placed where they do the least harm to the surface shading/deformation.

You can see on the wiki image, they've been moved further up and out of the way of the mouth.

Ah okay, thanks. I placed my pole nearer the nostril.

musashidan

Poles are essential in any kind of topology where edgeloops intersect and branch in different directions.

Where you've put it is right where the nasalabial furrow is. Be better to move it in 1 span towards the nostril, although generally for high poly sculpts it won't matter that much as you add more geo and details.

Deqa

musashidan said:

Poles are essential in any kind of topology where edgeloops intersect and branch in different directions.

Where you've put it is right where the nasalabial furrow is. Be better to move it in 1 span towards the nostril, although generally for high poly sculpts it won't matter that much as you add more geo and details.

Yeah, I see in a lot of head topology refs that it is next to the nostril instead of one span away from it. Just my topology that I'll have to fix. I guess it would be a shader issue entirely and wouldn't matter at all with details, pores, wrinkling, lighting, subdivision, or whatever.

Mark Dygert

I rig and animate faces, personally they aren't that big of a deal in either case. I do prefer them closer to the mouth than the nose because that area by the nostril can crunch kind of weird, it has to fold in a particular way and having a weird poly there can cause issues if it doesn't fold the right way.

Down closer to the mouth it slides around but usually doesn't fold or get tucked into the nostril.

But really that's just a minor nitpick and I've dealt with both and always gotten good results. So in general I'd say ask the guy rigging it up, work something out and stick to it on every mesh. Don't throw a bunch of similar heads with different topology into the pipeline, be consistent and settle it early on.