26. Now we're going to create the base for the eyes. Creating circular loops around the eyes makes it easy to add additional loops later, but also creates the most optimal topology to animate the eyes. Select the polygons around the eye and right-click over the model, selecting Inset. The cursor will change, and click-and-dragging over the selected polygons will create a loop inside of the selected one (Fig.26).


27. Like the eyes, I'm going to create more loops inside of the mouth section. I create circular loops around the mouth, making sure to position them at key points that will affect the silhouette; for example, the top of the upper lip, which in its circular form will create the bottom part of the lower lip (Fig.27).


28. I've selected the newly created eye polygons and created another inset. The size of the inset does not matter here as we will right-click again on our object and hit Collapse. All selected polygons will now have been collapsed into a single vertex. I'm also insetting polygons on the side of the head to form the ear. We want the topology of the top and side of the head to flow into the ear naturally, as without the benefit of mesh/Turbosmooth, any ugly topology connecting to the ear at harsh angles will appear darkly coloured due to the way realtime engines handle smoothing groups (Fig.28).


29. Add further loops to form the chin and jaw, making sure it follows the jaw line all the way up to the ear. As the nose does not really stick out of the character in the concept, we will not add topology for it. Rather, we will use the normal map from the high-poly sculpt alongside a good texture to achieve a realistic result. Not all detail needs to be in the base mesh, only detail that effects the silhouette, or will do when the character deforms (Fig.29).



30. Let's not forget the back of the character. It's great to work on a specific area for a long time, but it's easy to get too focused on a particular area and go into too much detail before it's time. It's important to work the overall shape of the model and try to work in stages. Each stage should add another level of detail to your model, as if you were subdividing in ZBrush, or adding another level of smoothing. That means detail like the eyes, small muscles, or veins should all come at the end of the whole process (Fig.30).