I have been working on a model that I would like to prepare for rigging and animation, and I am almost finished with the retopology. The only part left is the thumb but I figured I would stop now and seek some guidance.
I have a lot of poles around the face and shoulder that are causing problems. How should I redirect the retopology to fix it, or will I have to start over to fix the retopo? If there are other issues please point them out, as any tips at this stage is greatly appreciated.
The topology depends on what kind of movement/deform it has to enable. If the eyes blink, more vertical cuts so there are more control loops to close the eyes. Same for the mouth, but it might also require loops around the mouth to have clean deform, to keep the poles away from that area.
Could try planning ahead, maybe marking the areas with most movement and see if that would give ideas on where to put poles. If there are poles away from the intersections and otherwise away from the areas that deform a lot, it should work better.
Could maybe give it shoulders (as in structure flow) and get the pole away from the neck below the armpit level. Loops around the features of the face probably need to be continuous so no poles on those.
How you redirect those is up to you. Could use n-gons to blank an area and cut it again with knife or vertex connect.
There’s no subsurface modifier, it’s subdivision surface modifier. You’re confusing that with subsurface scattering.
Poles redirect loops and subdivision surface modifier will keep the poles because the loops around subdivide in the direction of the loops, retaining the overall flow so there are no surprises after adding it.
