3d Tutorial

Human head model

There are lot's of tutorials on the web about modeling a human head, so I won't go over the merits and differences of methods again. There are a few things worse of mentioning - you will get a more successful results if you will try to model an original face with interesting features - curved nose, scars or strong ethnic elements could make your rendering interesting and believable. The best thing to do, is to look into photographic book, National Geographic magazines or other things like that for inspiration. You can scan a picture and use it as your template for modeling. I use polymodeling for my human face, it gives more control, and less trouble while rendering.

First steps

When you have your template image ready, go to Maya's front view, and in the camera attribute editor create an image plane, assign your template image to this plane.
With create polygon tool make a new polygon, which would outline the head silhouette. Use as little points as possible, and try to put them in places which would be usefull as the starting point for internal polygon edges.
Now it's time to split the first polygon vertically in the center, and then horizontally at the level of the eyebrows, eyes, and the lips. Delete the right or left side of the head (afterwards you will mirror it back, for now it's easier to work on one half) and split the remaining polygons a few times connecting them to the outer vertices.

Try to stay with a as low vertice count as possible, you will have to pull them in 3d space to get the volume of the shape. Easiest to do this is by putting another template image (at least a simple pencil sketch of the profile) into your side view, and pull the vertices into the right position. Keep your model smooth shaded, and make all your edges soft to have a better feedback of what you are doing.
It isn't as difficult as it sounds, the basic shape will appear very quickly, you might want to add some more edges here and there to get it right, but still try to keep it as simple as possible for the next step.

When you are happy with the basic shape of the head, it's time to apply a fantastic mel-script created by Dirk Bialluch "Connect Poly Shape". It mirrors your low poly head and creates another subdivided version of the head, which makes work so much easier. You tweak a few polys and vertices of low poly half, and see the result on both sides of the smooth version. You will get a very decent result in no time.

Add detail like eyes and ears, wrinkles (the more the beter) dimples etc. Remember, some of the facial detail you can get with bump map, but the main details are better to model, rendering results will be much better. Another issue - a human face is never symetric, but the result of using the half head technique is that you've got yourself a perfectly symetrical model. So when the basic modeling is done, disconnect smoothed shape, and work on both sides separately. The more differences there will be between the sides - the more realistic the final render will appear.