Creating the back of the head

Alas this was one of those cases when a bit of mindless playing about in 3DS Max leads to some pretty sweet results. As a result, the screenshots for this section are somewhat low in number. In a bid to "try a few things out" in a spare 20 minutes to try and get the hang of what to expect for the next phase, I ended up creating the back of the head! The process holds a lot of the same principles as the spline modelling of the face (Topology and using quads to create a smooth surface). Only this time, we would shave off a lot of the time and effort off by using a sphere as a base. Using it as a basic shape meant that the majority of the natural curves and quads were taken care of, thus making my job a lot easier!

I started off with the sphere, and using the 2 pictures as a guide, moved and rescaled it so that it comfortably fit the shape of my head (As well as changing the overall size, you'll also probably need to scale it in single directions to squash or stretch the ball shape into more of an oval shape). With the finished ball, it was then a case of removing the faces which weren't useful. As the front of the face is complete, the batch of faces nearest that would not be required, nor would those on the bottom of the head, as that needs to lead to the neck. In addition, the ones of the side of the face were removed, due to the fact that most of the faces pulled in to a single vertex, creating a large number of triangles (And would subsequently create an annoying pinch). This left a 'cap' that basically covered the top and back of the skull. From here, we could begin:

With the base now ready, the first step was the join the 'cap' to the tips of the finished face. Enabling the 'snap' tool, the edge vertices of the tip of the 'cap' were pulled and joined to the top of the face mesh. With this complete, the next step was simply to fill in the gaps at the side of the head (Around where the ears are). The finished form is above, however, you can see the mesh with the quads in the image below. The majority of these quads were taken from from the initial sphere shape. Instead of pulling out new quads, I used the majority of the ones already present, and just moved them lower down the head (Whilst ensuring I kept a smooth line of quads). A couple were created to fill the occasional gap, but the majority of the side of the head you see is from the initial sphere. To be honest, I ignored most of the head topology that was drawn in beforehand, and worked more on looking how the edges of this part flowed. At the time, this was simply me messing around to see how the head might connect to the face... it wasn't intended to be the 'official' construction. Of course that was before I saw it click together quite nicely! Once the side of the head was all connected up with the face mesh, the 2 segments were attached to each other (The face was selected and 'attach' was selected, followed by the selection of the skull), and vertices all welded (To ensure the connecting vertices moved as one). With the back of the head completed above, it was then time to work in the neck and the chin.

Fortunately, with the top of the head completed, it was easy to create the quads for the neck. Before I did this, I pulled out a single set of faces from the chin (Using the entire set of edges from the chin that weren't connected up to the back of the head). This allowed me to at least have a chin! (If the neck quads were pulled straight down from the tip of the chin, my entire head would be one with my neck). These faces were tucked under the chin leading to the neck (The darker line of quads under my jawline in the above image) and any linking vertices welded where necessary. From here, I now had a perfect neck shape from the edges. I was quite literally able to select all the edges on the tip hole where the neck would be, and drag down a new set of faces (Move + shift key, remember?). I performed this a few times to get a nice batch of faces to modify round the contours of my neck (As opposed to a simple face that would create a very flat cylinder/cone shape). In particular, I needed a nice set of faces around the area where my Adam's Apple resides. The cluster of vertices allowed me to pull out a small notch at the front. As for the rest of the neck, I struck pretty lucky!

If you look at the neck (particularly on the side view), it looks as if there are veins/muscles in it. I will admit that this was a simply a superb and lucky coincidence! When I first pulled all the faces down for the neck and spaced them out to form the initial contours of my torso, a few uneven vertices meant that slight 'tubes' emerged from a single edge vertical sticking out a little bit more prominently than the others. This immediately created the illusion of veins/muscles, and were subsequently kept for obvious reasons!