More research…

Topology research begins, started with online searching as much as I could find on the subject, which surprisingly wasn’t that much. There were more examples than I could count of good and bad topology but very little descriptions of what topology actually was. Found a couple of books at the library which may help.

Peter M. Plentec, (2004) ‘Virtual Humans’

Jason Osipa, (2007) ‘Stop Staring’

Frederic I. Parke, Keith Waters, (2008) ‘Computer facial animation’

The books were very comprehensive but didn’t have much information for the 3D modelling beginner, apart from Parke and Waters book which did have a large amount of information on the foundations of modelling but not enough dedicated to topology so I took my search for information back online and found a few helpful forums.

CG Talk – http://forums.cgsociety.org/

SubdivisionModelling.com - http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/

Polycount -- http://boards.polycount.net/

I posted threads in these forums asking for advice and although I had to wait quite a while, I was awarded with a lot of very useful information. The large majority of the information that was made available to me, although very detailed was not entry level so I had to do a lot of reading up on the subject to understand the use and application of Nurbs, tri’s, etc before the research and information started to make sense.

However all of the information I learned while researching facial topology was of great use in my clay and Mudbox head modelling as topology taught me to be able to read the ‘flow’ of the human face with greater accuracy. Learning where and how I would place ‘Edge Loops’ taught me the contours of the face including defining the finder details such as the nasolabial fold…

and the mound at the corner of the mouth…

I was able to apply what I had learned in my research and transfer it to my sculpting process.