Click here to see a movie of the head model. (QuickTime, 544 kb)
I started out with photos of my head from the front and side, which then had to be carefully fudged (rotated, scaled) in photoshop to get the features to align (top of head, eye midline, ears, mouth, bottom of nose, etc.). I suppose if I had used a long lens and taken the photos more carefully that wouldn't have been necessary. These were set to display inside the front and right views.
I built the face up, polygon by polygon. Lots of adding points, aligning them in both views, then using the bridge tool to build polys (much faster than the create polygon tool). The poly cage was in a symmetry object (to duplicate the left side to the right), which was in a hypernurbs object. It was very handy to be able to quickly turn the display of those objects on and off in the object manager to check progress on the cage and tweak. I had built the ear previously from a tutorial by Richard Natzke.
The final cage is around 800 polys. I put bones in to move the jaw and eyelids, set vertex weight on the relevant polys, and added restriction tags to the bones, and now I can open and close the jaw and eyes (within reason), though I have to have a separate bone for the teeth, which are a discrete object. I have now added an expression to the teeth bone to make it follow the jaw bone.
The texture map is based on a photograph of my face.
I can be reached at n.woolridge@utoronto.ca