Step-6- Details-n-Loops
- Theres no secret to making good loops. The only things you should consider when modeling your details is how the muscles flow, where they are, and how they work. ( if you will be doing facial expression sculpting ). In the above illustration, notice how the mouths, and eyes muscle fibers run in a circular fashion. well when you model your loops this is exactly how the edges should flow. So half your head should be made up of ripples. and the rest just blends in.
- Once you get one loop on the mouth finished ( the lips for example ), its all downhill from there. because what you can then do is select that one Edgeloop, use bevel, and finally just move the points around. the reason why i suggest for using bevels is because if you have a nice edgeloop on the lips, but on the outside perimiter of those lips and around the nose if there are triangles or maybe an n-gon , then if you used edgering ( struts ) or equivalent to connect edges that dont make up a perfect loop. then you will get more triangles into the mix.which will make it frustrating to get your flow set right. while the bevel will make two solid loops out of one. and just work your way outward. ( to speed up the process even more you should be selecting multiple edges, convert that to edgeloop selection and bevel them. so instead of making only one edgeloop at a time and moving the points around you could by selecting as little as 3 edges....you could convert that and bevel into 6 loops.
- Just keep on beveling edgeloops, moving points until you get a nice surface flow. but dont over do it. because for now we still want to keep things simple for the later steps.
- lets do a little work on the neck. first we want to add the large ( sterno-cleido-mastoideus ) neck muscle that helps the head turn from side to side and do things such as tilt. it runs from the clavicle and connects to the skull ( right behind the jaw and under the ear. ). so just use a few connect commands and move the points so they run smoothly around the neck. remember to always rotate your view to make sure that the contours are right. At this point you also might want to consider pressing "D" so you go into the Mirai shading domain. which doesnt display any edges. and is set to smooth. this will make it easier for you to spot problem areas.
- add more edges across the neck and move the points around. as well as trying to keep a consistant loop topology. this part now will require some trial and error. moving points around, cutting edges, connecting, dissolving, beveling, etc. because every character is different, necs can vary by a lot. with double chins, or wrincles.
- making the collar bones is easy. just put in some vertical edges first.,split them, and move points around.
note: around this time you should start considering to make a nice clean series of edges that will go from the shoulder area, to the rop of the head. we will use that as a guide of where the seam will be for when we unfold the model for mapping. the head will be split into 2 parts, the front and the back side, and the seam will go through the side of the head and cut the ear ( front and back ) he will have elven ears, so splitting the ears for front and back makes sense since the backside of the ear will be a little more exposed than a human ear. the modeling method that I will use is also different than that of a human ear. to learn how to model a human ear check out my ear modeling video or the ear Gif by Bay.... but before we do that. lets put in a rough guide of where the ear will be.
- to plot the placement of the ear, draw a vertical line from the jaw and a horizontal line from the eyes. That intersection wil be the top part of the conection going from the ear to he head.
- pick the 2 polies for the ear ( yellow ), and do an extrude region. scale the tip down a little, use a few connects and moves to shape the ear. i will do further editing to the ear later. but for now the model is pretty much ready to go through some initial unfolding.
