What I did:

Firstly, apologies, it’s been a while since my last conf… sorry, since my last post! I have much to report.

The face I had created just looked off, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.

I also came to realise that in order for my character’s face to animate well, there is a tried and tested way of setting up facial polygons which relate to the muscle structure of the human body. More on that later.

Off with their heads:

I feel happy with the body of my character, but this head has been causing me concern. It was suggested by my tutor that I take a step back to explore what ‘Image to 3D’ could make of my character reference images.

Tencent Hunyuan 3D 2.1

I tried a variety of different settings using this model, but the likeness wasn’t there.

 

Tencent Hunyuan 3D 2MV Turbo

Tried this model using multiple view image references, but the results were also poor, even after adjusting settings.

Meshy AI

Meshy gave much better results, closer to the kind of model I had in mind.

Bringing this model into Blender brought with it a whole new set of issues. The topology on the left is from my existing character model, the one to the right is from Meshy.

As I was only looking at the head, I first detached this from the rest of the Meshy model.

As I set about cleaning up the mesh, I noticed the model had a second skin lining on the inside of the head, so I manually removed this. It took quite a bit of time as in places removing the inside also affected the outer mesh.

Shrinkwrap

Once the mesh looked pretty solid, I tried using the Shrinkwrap modifier, but I’d never used it before, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I added a mesh plane and positioned it above the head and extruded down so that it formed a cube around the head. I added loop cuts in key positions to try and wrap the head, but it didn’t give the right result, it was literally like cling film. An interesting effect for some uses, but not what I needed in this case.

Then I tried adding a cube inside the head, thinking I might be able to work from the inside out and projecting the clean cube onto the shape of the head, but the results were messy.

Quad Remesher

I tried a change of tack and used the Quad Remesher 1.4 add-on. This worked to a degree (it made quads), but revealed there were a good few holes in the original Meshy mesh.

I reverted back to the Meshy model and decimated the topology as it was too complex to see what was going on properly. This revealed where there were holes in the mesh, so I merged individual vertices to knit it together.

Once I was confident I had one piece of geometry, I went back to Quad Remesher and got a much cleaner looking model. There were a couple of holes and non-quads, but they were easy enough to repair.

Close, but no cigar!

I showed this to my tutor and he said that the geometry wasn’t right for animation. As I mentioned earlier, there is a way to set up facial geometry in order to get it to animate correctly. What I had was not it! The image below shows how different regions of the face should be set up in order to animate well.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/FaceTopology

He showed me another add-on which would allow me to quickly create the correct topology using the Meshy model as a base. Unfortunately, the add-on doesn’t work on Mac, but could be really useful for PC users.

A friend shared a link to a facial topology tutorial, Retopology for Beginners by Ryan King Art– https://youtu.be/1myOZaxtHes?si=0872AvoTOLfX-xSs

I followed this tutorial as much as I could (my mesh has hair which makes things a bit more tricky). This workflow uses the Shrinkwrap modifier again, and a plane, but you make the plane small and extrude it gradually to cover the whole head, following the rings needed for sound topology. The Shrinkwrap modifier allows you to extrude following your base mesh closely. This was the answer I had been searching for, although I didn’t know it!

So far, I have a mask of sorts. I still need to continue the mesh at the back of the ears and around the neck. I need to create some new eyebrows, as the original ones are rubbish! I also need to extend the neck downwards so that it finishes inside the shirt collar – something else I hadn’t realised.

Body-wise, I need to remove the arms, legs and torso, so that the mesh is made up of the clothing, not the body underneath it.

What I learned:

AI tools have limitations: Image-to-3D can be a useful starting point, but the results rarely give you exactly what you need. Meshy gave me the best results of the three tools I tried, but it still required significant cleanup and the topology was completely wrong for animation.

Topology matters more than I thought: It’s not just about making a model that looks right – facial topology needs to follow specific patterns based on human muscle structure to animate properly. The Polycount face topology guide showed me exactly why the original head was wrong.

Sometimes you need to start over: I spent ages trying to salvage and fix things (removing the double skin layer, filling holes, decimating) when the real solution was to use the AI model purely as a reference and retopologise from scratch.

Shrinkwrap can be brilliant when used correctly: My first attempts at shrinkwrapping were a disaster because I was approaching it wrong. Ryan King’s retopology tutorial showed me the proper workflow – starting with a small plane and gradually extruding to cover the base mesh whilst maintaining correct topology. Game changer!

Next:

As mentioned, I still have a little work to do to get my mesh finished, and then for the rigging, finally!