To start my character bust, I found a wireframe head reference in one of my d'Artiste books. Massive Black used this head as a base to sculpt the main character's face in Killzone2. I took a picture of the reference, highlighted the most important edge loops I needed to follow, and went to work.
Backing up a bit, here's my thoughts on workflow and process. Some people start sculpting right away from a cube or something, but then they have to retopologize halfway through to get the detail where they need it. Then they have to retopologize at the end again to get edge loops for deformation. That's seems unnecessary and unrealistic to game development pipelines. No one else can work on the character if it's started in ZBrush. Plus the retopologizing process has to be done a couple times before it's finished.
I think my process here is going to be more streamlined and pipeline friendly. I'm going to start in Maya, and get all my wires laid out and in the proper edgeloops. I will keep everything quads for easy and artifact-free sculpting. I won't pay much attention to the closeness of the model save for an occasional glance now and then. With the wires done, I will lay out the UVs like any other standard character face. Only after all of that will I export it to ZBrush and sculpt. Then I can sculpt worry-free, since ZBrush automatically adjusts the lowest subdivision levels to match the highest levels. Once I'm done, I can kick my lowest level back to Maya, select all my UV's simply adjust them to fit, then make my normal map. From there I can decide if I want to bring it back into ZBrush a final time and paint my texture there (which is looking to be what I'll do), or paint it old-school in Photoshop. I think this is more like what a studio would expect, that way a rigger and animator can work with my character pre-Zbrush while I make it "more awesomer."
Here's the reference I found for a base head with the the important edge loops defined:
Here's the model I'm using as a reference:
And here's what I have so far:
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Ben
