Character Design and Creation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 69

When you use quads for your modeling, you can
construct what many (but not all) consider to be
the Holy Grail of animation meshes: the loop . Face
loops are rings of quad faces that follow the con-
tours and underlying musculature of a character.
They produce signifi cantly more realistic deforma-
tions when animated than would be created with
a simple grid pattern of faces. In Figure 5.27, two
edge loops have been highlighted on the Beast's
face. Edge loops and face loops are closely related,
with the distinction being that face loops are com-
posed of faces and edge loops are composed of …
shockingly, edges. Although edge loops will help
in almost any deformation situation, they are most
important around the eyes and mouth because they
are the most expressive parts of the face.

Figure 5.27 Eye and mouth edge loops

Entire topics have been written about the mesh topology of human models. Some animators and modelers
spend a large portion of their time painstakingly tweaking their characters until every single triangle is elimi-
nated and the edge looping structure is a thing of simple elegance. Indeed, you may fi nd someday that you,
too, want to do that. But my guess is that today, you want to get working on your character.

On the disc that comes with this topic is a generic head structure, with edge loops already in place and nary a
triangle to darken your deformations (Figure 5.28, basic_head.blend on disc). This mesh structure can be laid

Figure 5.28 A basic, low resolution edge looped head