At the end of my last post, I had set up the base head for adding in the harder parts of the head (Image 1 below)- the nose and mouth - the features of the face. As I said then, I was a little on my own as Jonathan Williamson's tutorial ( here or here) describes building an avatar that does not have eyes - rather shades/goggles/glasses. But it turned out to be quite easy to adapt and change things.

I had set the model up to add the mouth and nose with the last two simple extrusions (marked above for the chin and bridge of the nose. And then I added the the nose and mouth - just like Williamson does at 44.10 of his video tutorial. (Note I changed the order of building at this point as Williamson adds in the quads at the side of the head before this. I figured this would be easier to do after I had added the hard parts.) Here is the result, Image 2 below - and I have hidden the back of the head mesh in the front view so the additions are easier to see.

Now I proceeded to fill in the side of the head starting with the extrusion of a single vertex (highlighted with the red box) as shown in Image2 and 3A(remember we are mirroring all actions so this gets done on both sides of the head).

Now select the 4 vertices shown and fill with a face (the F key) - Image 3B. Repeat a vertex extrusion and fill once more to the right and then down twice (Image 3C)

I then divided twice, along the vertical edges, the quads highlighted by the green box. This was done so that I can link up to the detail of eyes and cheek bones later. It also allows me to set up some quads later for adding ears - though I don't intend to do this with a female avatar as I plan to add hair eventually. (Note - this is just adding detail where it is needed, not a wholescale subdivision of the head with the consequent increase in faces to be rendered later in vrml - a benefit of this type of  building faces as quads not triangles.)

The two edges marked in yellow are extruded three times to match the vertices at the back of the head (image 3D). If you look at the vertices outlined in purple you should see all the quads that will be added next using the face creation from 4 vertices procedure.

Image 4 shows the completion of that step (the green arrow). Then the edge of the final face creation down the side of the head (red box) is extruded twice (to match vertices in the chin) and finally a face is created from the four vertices in the blue and yellow boxes - and bingo most of the side of the head is filled - just the eyes, cheeks and a little area along the jaw line (count the vertices and guess what will happen here ;-) )

More to come - but almost finished now

griff :)