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Smoothing Groups - Q.) Why do some parts of my face look all flat and faceted, while othe parts looks smoothed over? All the new stuff I add from inset and from creating new faces all look all flat. what's up with that? A.) The answer is smoothing groups! When doing high-poly modeling, you rarely bother with smoothing groups, but when you're doing lower-poly modeling, it's a nessecity! Go into Poly select mode and select your Entire Face. Now scroll way towards the bottom in the editable poly parameters area and find the thing that looks like the image below. Click on one of the numbers (any one, I usually start from 1 and work my way down as I add more groups). So click on 1. Now all of the faces are smoothed together. They're all in group 1.
 One thing I like to do is give the bottom of the upper lip it's own smooth group so deselect everything and just select the upper lip area. Now in the smoothing groups area, unclick #1 and click #2. Now there is a hard edge along the outer part of the lip, but the lip itself is smoothed. Smoothing groups can be very useful in lower poly modeling. It can create edges and give better definition to areas where there is little poly-information.
Next we'll move onto the nose. A nose can be difficult to get the correct shape with, so it's not something you should just breeze through. Don't worry if you don't get it right the first few tries. We'll have to cut in some edges, and probably extrude a couple faces to get the right shape here. Forst lets make sure that the existing geometry is shaped good so we can get started without too much trouble.
 I selected several edges along the face and nose. The plan is to add edges that follow this path. The reason I selected all of the edges leading up to the eye instead of just selecting the nose ones I actually want to add stuff to is to avoide dead-end edges. The image below demonstrates an edge that end in the middle of another edge. Leaving an edge end like this creates messy geometry and deforms very poorly when animated.
 I had to cut in a lot of new edges in order to get enough verticies to work with and get the detail I wanted.
Key things to remember to take into account: The outer part of the nostril extrudes from the side of the nose. You need to make a couple of rings on the side of the nose so that you can pull these verticies out and maintain the correct shape.
 So after a lot of adjusting and cleaning, this is what I ended up with. I'm showing you my progress from multiple perspectives so you can get a better idea of how I shaped the various masses. If you're aiming for a slightly more simplified/stylized version of a nose, feel free to limit the amount of detail you put into your model.
 Click me to view larger version So this is my current status. The only remaining blemish is the eyes. Even though the eyes on the original doll, look large... they don't look this large. This looks more like an alien than the face I'm aiming for, so I know there is going to be some adjusting to do.
 Click me to view larger version First thing I did was cleanup the loops around the eye. The part selected in red in the image below is the actual eye socket area. In a moment we'll be pulling this back into the head to make room for the eye. Around the eye socket are two primary loops. One will be responsible for pulling out the eye lid, the other for pulling back. Compare the red line (the outer curve of the lid) with it's counterpart in the profile view. Now see how the blue line pulls back and creates the thickness of the lids.
 Click me to view larger version
Next thing we need to do is to create the eye socket. Select the inner eye area like I have above and find the button called "Bevel" for the bevel settings, make the height a negative number (pull the slider's and watch it's effects on the model for best results) so that it's pulling back inside the head, and make the ouline amount a positive number so that it's increasing the size.
 Click me to view larger version Click the APPLY button, NOT OK. This will apply the current bevel and start another bevel from it. For this one, make the height an even larger negative number to pull it back into the head even more, and make the outline amount a negative number, to shrink the size of the face. Click okay and move, scale, and rotate the faces until you feel that the cavity is a decent shape. Then go into vertex edit mode and try to round it out some. Cut in some new edges and connect some verticies to help you get the shape better. Next we're going to make the eyeballs. It's important to make the eyeballs before we go any further, since from here out, we'll be shaping the eyelids to fit around the balls more smoothly.
 Go back to the Create Tab and click on the Sphere Button. Make a sphere about where the eye should go. Go back to perspective view and move the eye around till it's in place. Now chances are that it won't fit at all at first. You'll have to adjust the radius of the sphere and make it larger/smaller (most likely larger... much larger than you would think) and move it around a lot to find a way to make it fit better.
 Click me to view larger version So this is where I ended up. Don't worry if the eye sticks out a bit from the head in some areas. We'll be adjusting the head itself in a moment to compensate for that. When adjusting the sphere, try to get one of the sphere's pole's to be at the front-center of the eye. (see the red circles in the image above) This will make it easier to make the eye and texture it later on.
 Click me to view larger version Select your head model and return to the modify tab. Go to vertex mode and begin adjusting the shape of the eye so that it deforms around the eyeball better. Go back and adjust the position and size of the eyeball if you have to. Continue this until you are satisfied with the shape of the eye.
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and click on the little box next to it. This should open a window and a preview of the effects it'll do to your model sill show up on the model.