Part 1: Gereral Overview

Considerations For Animation

Once you have determined the criteria for creating your character's texture map, you will need to consider if your character is going to be animated.
Assuming your character is intended for animation, obtaining a storyboard depicting the scene your model will be used in and speaking to the rigging and animation team about thier requirements can reveal such usfeul information as what areas of your character's head will be manipulated most extensively during animation.
Obtaining this information will help you determine,

• What needs to be modeled on your character's head and the level of realism that needs to be achieved during deformation within these areas.
• Conversly, what areas on your character's head do not need to be modelled and can be faked with a texture instead of geometry yet still look convincing.

It would be near impossible for the other departments to work effeciently with a model having such a high polygon count.
Consider when you are working on a 3D project that you are working towards a goal and that your task might not necassarily be the one that converts into the main goal. It is often that products output from a 3D application have to go through some refinement process before reach the end user.
For example, a compositing application to combine all the different renderings and image sequences into a movie for TV, DVD, Blu-Ray, cinema etc, or even a games engine to optimize and make the animations you created interactive, a web graphics optimization toolkit to reduce the size of the image with better compression algorithms and color correction tools for an internet browser.

However, it is occasionally unavoidable that certain exceptionally detailed areas of a character need to modeled, particularly if those areas are going to appear in ECU shots, or if they are going to be deformed through animation while other areas of a character can be approximated using simple texture mapping and lighting techniques.