Secrets of Swimsuit Babeby Jimmy Chow, Hong Kong
Head
To construct the head, you can start from a cube or a sphere and then pull vertices to rough out the overall shape. The following figure illustrates the processes.
It doesn’t matter how you start because the edge flow will not be evolved from them and will be changed later. Your objective is to rough out the shapes and positions of brows, cheekbone, chin, nose, forehead. Topology doesn’t matter for now. There’s no need to refine details as they’ll be destroyed later.
Combine
By now, you’ve got three separate pieces of geometry which can roughly show how your character looks like. You should be able to judge whether it looks like your character or not because you can see the relative positions and sizes of all the major features which are eyes, lips, brows, nose, cheekbone, jaw, chin, forehead, etc. Before combining them, dig holes in the head for eyes and lips. Split the surrounding polygons so that the vertex count matches those in eyes and lips patches. Make sure the directions of normals are consistent in all geometries. Then combine them and merge vertices.
Edge Flow
This is a revolutionary step. You’re going to revolutionize the edge flow on the face. There’re two runs: from nose ridge to jaw and from mouth corner to ear. Refer to the figure below.
This is the edge flow I’ve learnt from Steven Stahlberg’s facial topology image posted in the Body Topology thread in CGTalk. In the process of changing edge flow, you’ll need to adjust the positions of vertices so as to form proper contours. Rotate the head and tweak it for all contours you can see. Look at your photos, drawing books as well as yourself for reference. Note the crease running down from the back of the nose to the corner of the mouth. It has major contribution to likeness. Its slant and shadow can largely affect the appearance of your character.
You may probably find that this edge flow may not be enough to emphasize the shape around the cheekbone. This is because its structure is too regular. So you can redirect some edges and mess up the topology to form other structures. Here are some examples.
