Week 2 - Face Topology

Week 2 started off with our weekly lecture with Jo Bowman. She went through our blogs and discussed what stages we were up to with our individual head models. We also discussed as groups the task that we had ahead for the Visit Essex project.

I downloaded and viewed the next couple of tutorials for the head model. I looked at what the next tasks were whilst also looking ahead over the next couple of videos so I had a good idea of what to expect and also what I would be hoping to achieve. The first thing I needed to do was work on the Topology of the face. This would be done by taking the images that I had already taken and aligned and drawing on them in Photoshop. I would be drawing lines of Topology, which pretty much is the individual lines that make up a human head. These lines would be used to create the face,

The first step was to look at the key parts of the face that would have an effect when creating the head model. Examples of this would be Wrinkles, Nostrils, Eye Shadows and any other possible indents on the face. As suggested by the tutorial, I drew these lines in blue and would ten continue to draw the other lines of Topology in red. This would allow me to distinguish where the key parts of the face were and to ensure that I took them into consideration for later.

I then used the Blue Topology lines that I had created as guidelines for the drawing of the rest of the Topology of my face. This was definitely the hardest test I had so far and after speaking to many classmates, it seems that this was the case for a lot of people. It was difficult because the first thing I was trying to do was to create a flow of lines through the face. I was also ensuring that I took all the key features of the face into consideration. This made parts of the face such as the nose, eyes and mouth tough to work on.

The toughest part of this task was ensuring that all of the lines would only create quads. This is very important because Quads create the best flow of topology whereas 3 or 5 sided shapes create issues by vertices pinching and not smoothing properly. This caused me to have to attempt these topology lines a number of times to ensure that only quads would be created.