Here is a visual demonstration of what a good base mesh can be. All the faces in this article were built off the same base mesh, which can be downloaded at the end of this article. I developed this base mesh after running into sculpting problems with my previous meshes. I made a conscious effort to replicate the muscle and bone structure of a real face while at the same time leaving a low enough poly-count that the mesh could still be adapted to different faces. The development of this mesh owes a lot to ZBrush Studio Projects: Realistic Game Characters by Ryan Kingslien and L’Ecorche iPhone/iPad app by Michael Defeo and Scott Eaton.
Method of Production
Eyes, eyebrows, hair and, eyelashes were all done as separate ZTools. I used mask extraction to create the eyebrows and eyelashes. I appended a polysphere for most of the hair. The dreads were done using the Curve Multitubes brush. My five most frequently used brushes were Move Topological, Inflate, Trim Dynamic, Damian Standard (Dam Standard) and Smooth. These scupltures can be seen in the round on my Youtube Channel.
Download Base Mesh Bust (Updated Feb 5, 2013)
Click here to download my base mesh bust. You can auto-polygroup the model using the existing UVs I created for it. It consists of 1034 quads and weighs in at 143 KB.
