Part 8 A Good Head On Your Shoulders

Well, the hard part is done and now it's time to complete the head and stick it on a pair of shoulders. If you're putting it on a body or planning on covering the base of the neck with clothing of some sort you don't have to bother making the shoulders like this, but a floating head looks kind of funny if it stops with the neck, so I'm making him into something more like a bust.

Detailed explanation below the video again.

Sorry, but I'm afraid it's going to be a while before I can move on to the next bit I had planned. Fortunately the teeth, gums, and tongue are going to be separate parts, so the head model itself is finished with the following video. 

Details

• We start by sealing up the eye cavity. Select the edge loop inside the eye.
• Extrude, translate into the head, and scale down.
• Turn off the Eyeball Layer.
• Flatten the extruded loop on the Z-Axis.
• Use Append Polygon Tool to close the back of the eye cavity. You may end up with a triangle, but since it's going to be hidden by an eyeball that's not something I worry about.
• Delete history, duplicate, and flip the head on the X-Axis.
• Freeze transformations. When you do this on a flipped object the normals always flip as well, so reverse the normals and delete history again.
• Select both halves, Combine: Mesh, and delete history again. If you don't delete history before and after combining meshes weird things can happen later. Maybe not every time but I've seen entire models ruined because a student forgot to do this.
• Select the vertices down the center and merge them.
• Soften edges and delete history.
• How's it look? It won't hurt to give your geometry one last check before moving on.
• Now we move on to the mouth cavity. From the inside of the head, select the inner edge loop on the mouth.
• Extrude, scale taller and wider, and translate the loop into the head.
• Adjust the vertices to keep them evenly spaced and the loop round.
• Extrude the loop again. Pull it in and scale it slightly larger. This is the back of the mouth cavity and should bow backwards so scale it down on Z until it reverses it's direction.
• Use Append to Polygon Tool to seal up the back of the mouth.
• Insert an edge loop across the appended polygons and snap the vertices on the end to the vertices of the middle edge on the side of the mouth cavity. Merge vertices.
• Adjust the geometry to remove any sharp edges.
• Turn the Eyeball Layer back on and make sure it's no longer set to Reference or Template.
• Select the LEye Group and add it to a new group (control g). The new group's pivot is in the Center Point, so you can duplicate and flip the group on the X-Axis. If you had flipped the LEye Group it would have mirrored itself across its pivot which is centered in the middle of the eyeball.
• Select the duplicated LEye Group and flip it's X-Scale back to positive one.
• Open the Outliner and open Group 2 (The duplicated group) and rename LEye to REye.
• Remove LEye and REye from Groups 1 and 2 and delete the empty groups.
• Select the edge loop at the base of the neck. With your image planes turned back on, scale the loop up to match the shoulders.
• Extrude, pull down, and scale it up to the maximum width of the shoulders. If you're like me, you won't have the shoulders in full view on your image planes, so you'll just have to make a guess. You can change it later if it doesn't look right.
• Flatten the bottom on Y.
• Add an edge loop to round out the shoulders and scale it up to round them out and adjust the geometry to keep it all evenly spaced.
• This is the last time I'm going to say this about the head: soften the edges and delete history.