Note: Also, because the head has a more complex form, starting with the head risks letting its complexity trickle into the rest of the mesh. When you have a lot of polygons bordering the neck, you'll hesitate to fight it. You'll force the torso to fit the head, rather than the other way around. Then you'll end up with more polygons than you need to define the shoulders, the chest...the unneccessary complexity might even trickle into the extremities.In short: you'll have let a relatively small area of geometry determine the polygon count of your entire model; the modeling equivalent of forcing the rest of a drawing to fit a small detail that has already been drawn.
Start with the general before moving on to the specific.
(Those who have extensive modeling experience already know enough to look out for this modeling trap, and can start with any part of a model that they wish. For this tutorial, however, we will begin with the torso).
First, a few tips about building a model for celshading:
Note: Some might suggest that fresnel "inking" (such as the Bump Edges feature of Super Cel Shader) can substitute for Silhouette Edges, since fresnel inking is also angle-based. Fresnel inking can look fine in still images, but the illusion of a hand-drawn ink line often disappears during an animation. Try fresnel inking an animation of a human hand -- an artist once put it best when he compared the effect to "crawling highlights."
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