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I just wanted to show off some stuff I've been playing around with, maybe get some tips, maybe inspire some people.
I've been messing with animating faces.

As you can see below low poly heads are okay. You can do a decent job with good textures.
What sucks is that they are sort of blocky and they don't move. Same expression alive, dead, happy, sad.



I was thinking, well why not up the poly count a bit, and build in some sort of animation while I'm at it. One of those things I've been meaning to do.




Old Head Model: 206 Faces, 1 Bone.
New Head Model: 1164 Faces, 13 Bones.

I should point out that the textures used are about 90% the exact same. Added eyes, teeth, throat in unused space, stamped eyelids over old eyes.
When you have dozens of faces to convert, less work is awesome.

Special effort was made to ensure the new head fit the dimensions of the old head, so things like hair, hats, masks still would fit. I liked the old look so I made sure the best features were kept. I made the new face to be a supreme version of the old one, not just a better detailed face.

Also: I realized after years... the old head model didn't have ears. What was I thinking...

Using a face that can make expressions, and animate is huge. Even the subtlety of having the character look around and blink makes the character come alive. Talking also looks half decent.






The big trick with the mouth is allowing the upper and lower lips to move separately, not just the whole jaw. That way the face doesn't flap it's mouth like Pinocchio (wooden puppet).

All in all the new head took about 20 hours, from scratch. Biggest issues were making the mouth look right, and the eyelids. The eyelids still need work. The eyeballs wouldn't fit properly and you could see through the corners of the eyes where the eye whites didn't reach. Eyelids would look good open or look good closed, but not both. I'd say about a third of the time was on the eyelids.




Above: Some of the steps in Milkshape3D, the editor I used. I probably should learn Blender, or 3DS Max. lols.

The job isn't done, some of the features look a little bumpy, eyelids are a little blocky for my liking, some of the texture mapping needs to be tweaked, and the rigging for smiling is way off.
When I'm bored I'll give it another look. For now it will pass.

Good work! Now all it needs is a face editor like in the Sims.

lol I've been playing the Sims 3 for 2 weeks. Probably where I got the idea.

Edit: Another Comparison...


Edit Again:

You've got a good start here! way better than a lot of my older stuff.

What stands out the most to me though is that it looks much lower poly than ~1200. You could be using this count more efficiently to achieve a much smoother appearance and deformation.

You are having issues with the eyes because you are not really giving them enough geometry and there seems to be quite a bit of stretching around the mouth. In contrast, the nose and cheeks have more triangles than they need, these areas could be simplified and those triangles which are saved could then be spent on the eyes and mouth, and chin. The chin in particular looks far lower poly than it is with 3 sharp, distinct points and flat edges in between, however those flat edges already have vertices which could be repositioned to smooth out the curve.

It's hard to tell when everything is in triangles instead of quads, but it seems like you made some effort at topology around the eyes and mouth and that's great. look for ways to simplify the edge flow while reinforcing the topology loops and they will help to naturally define the features and provide for smoother deformations.

Take a look at this, you can see how the rings of the topology loops hardly have to bend and stretch at all during animation. Polys are pushed to where they have the most effect on either the silhouette or on the animating features and anything that won't move much gets trimmed down. It is 1160 triangles (excluding teeth) and has 19 bones, so fairly comparable in it's metrics.



and triangulated:



and some really good tutorial/reference:

http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/head1.php

http://www.phungdinhdung.org/Studies_paper/face_modeling_images/08_bad_good_topo.jpg

hope this stuff helps!

Yeah. I mentioned above my goal was to have the head fit inside the same space as the old one. Since the old head had great placement, despite being low poly, I super-imposed the new head over top of it and was able to quickly place most of the vertices accurately. One reason I'll try to learn blender, I had to do this all by hand one vertex at a time.



For the chin, I wanted the head to fit into some of the helmets I had already created. As you can see some of these wrap around the entire head object. When I realized that the old model didn't have ears, this became a moot point since it meant the helmet would need to be modified to cover the protruding ears. So one of the next steps will be rounding everything out. Since I have to modify the helmet, I'll just widen parts of it to fit the curves.


Yeah I was saying the eyelid is too blocky. I'll need to take it off and make a new higher poly one. The mouth is a rigging issue. I might get stuck having to add more vertices, but the big issue you are seeing is that the sides of the mouth are in error, rigged to the lower jaw. It's passable, but should be improved. Awesome video by the way, figured out how I'll rig the smiling now. Also the eyeballs were solved by adding the eye sockets, which I see you did also.


Yeah it was a mess putting it together, especially when all it was was a screen of vertices and I was stitching the faces together by hand one at a time, before they were moved and positioned correctly. The topology ring paradigm was a fluke, it just happened naturally since I plotted the vertices by hand judging where I'd need them to accommodate the topology.

I should also add that I haven't yet made any effort to smooth out the curves and in places stuff sticks in and out oddly, a little bit. So the model looks "bumpy" in places in bad lighting. It's only slight, but around the nose and cheeks.

Oh yeah, I'll make the texture 100% backwards compatible too since that will let me turn the detail on and off. It basically means not mapping the eyelids over where the eyes used to be.

The idea I had was to do it all in phases. This is just the first phase. I'll try to spend an hour or 2 on the weekend.

Those faces are priceless!

Btw using sphere is better for head: