One common problem for people working with this method is they get a lot of crossover and the mesh soon becomes very confusing. Even for the person who made it.

Crossover is generally caused by people thinking in the wrong way. It's all too easy to think of the vertices and edges as being controllers on a rubber sheet. While it's possible to get the correct end results, the base model becomes incredibly distorted. Try not to think of the surface as being elastic and instead model the curvature.

Here's an example illustration: the wrong method (above) involes pulling edges across surfaces to stretch the curve. The correct method (below) adds a chamfer to the edge of the curve. The end result is identical, but there are no crossovers.

It's sometimes easier to cross over, but just remember that it's not nescessary.. It's always possible to model it without, and it will save you a lot of trouble later if you model correctly.

Especially when texturing!

So finally for the head..

As I mentioned before; I remembered to print a paper copy from work on Friday. I've now got it sitting at the side of the monitor on this "bookchar" thingy I bought last week from a bookshop in Oxford. It's a kinda tabletop "lecturn" thing that's marketed for people to be able to eat their breakfast while this thing holds your book open. Okay so that's cheesy, (and I felt stupid for buying one) but it's incredibly useful for use with reference books. I've tried these "page-holder-monitor-clip-things before and they simply can't handle big heavy books.. this one can though.

The first thing I do is create a tube - the head is more cylindrical than cubic in nature. Because he's got such a huge jaw/mouth I model it in two halves.

From the original cylinder I bevelled in the core to create a mouth and cut it in half..I used "connect" on the interior edges, then "capped" the hole. The last thing I did before mirroring this half was to split the new cap polygons (manually, using "cut")

And you see here the rough cut of the model is starting to make a little more sense.

I've deleted some of the earlier "capped" faces that will become interior to the head and then I attached both halves together.

Once the I have one solid object I select face sub-object mode (Keyboard, 4) and create new polys in the gap, to create one solid object.

When creating a poly, remember to click on the first vertex again for the final vertex- this closes the shape.

"Always try to model shape divisible by eight; this ensures that you always get a symetrical shape on either axis for cutting,cloning mirroring etc."

"Yawn, c'mon" I thought.. "isn't that obvious?"

Well, obviously not, because I screwed up here. I want to make this thing perfectly symetrical to avoid screwups later. I use my Vertexplacer script again and place selected vertices on X=0.

I spend the next few hours writing Max scripts. I'm still new to scriptwriting, so I'm having loads of trouble -and getting nowhere fast. I basically want to automate the setting up of the "smooth reference" process on [selected object]. I've got most of it done easily; it's fully working now, except for the layout. I can't seem to find a way to script layout changes (two panels, side by side, perspective views, focused on each object individually.)

any email help would be greatly appreciated

It's getting late in the day, so I just run the script and manually change the viewports. Note: I've added a symmetry modifier to the meshsmooth stack on the reference object.

I won't get the head modelled today, but I will set it all up so it's fun to work on next time: In this case it's just a matter of pulling vertices about and the occasion splitting of polys to get a good approximation of the final shape.

It's good to leave it alone at this point anyway and come back to it with fresh eyes another day.