Facial Loops

 29/01/21 - Week 17

This week we have been going over retopping and an important part of this is creating correct facial loops. One of the main reasons that correct facial loops are needed is for animation which requires accurate expression so we can relate to and identify character emotion.

Widely accepted face loops mimic the muscles on the face to create accurate movement, you can see this by comparing these images below. A major example of this loop placement is the muscle around the eye, the orbicularis oculi, this muscle is responsible for eyelid movement and partially the eyebrows. The eyelids and eyebrows are two very telling parts of the face and most emotion can be told from these areas of the face, making this the most important muscle to mimic in topology. If this part was off it would be much harder to create realistic and instantly identifiable emotion.

This muscle is very easily identifiable as they look very similar in the topology and the muscle itself but all other loops in the face are still a rough recreation of how the face uses muscle to move. 

Obviously, perhaps an equally important part of the face to correctly mimic is the lips and mouth area. Without this correctly stretching and moving, it would make creating any mouth movement very difficult. Smiling and frowning are another instantly recognisable way of telling emotion so a lot of focus needs to be put here. The mouth can create quite extreme folds and distortion as well so a higher density of loops needs to be apparent here for support.

Most other areas of the face will not move in an extreme way so the use of looping around these two high priority areas provide extra assistance to allow for as little distortion as possible whilst still having similarity to the muscles on the face to increase realism and easy animation. You can see the way you can recognise this below: