Modeling organic items, such as animals, human heads and other body parts is never easy and needs quite a lot of skills and patience to do so. Fortunately, latest version of Blender came with a new cool feature, called Surface Subdivision, that make organic things a lot easier to model. Trees, body parts and even faces now come more easily under our mouse.
The purpose of this tutorial is to show the basics of human face modeling. Using these guidelines, you will get a quite acurate basic shape to work with more finely, weither you want to achieve toon-like pictures, or more realistic faces like the one below. Sure, it will take hours to get something like this, but it will be a very enjoying task to do so, not an harassing one.
Hair and beard were post-processed with The Gimp
And hey! once you have a basic shape like this, it is very fast and easy to tweak it into something totally different but based on exactly the SAME geometry like the picture below. You will quickly see that modeling heads becomes easier and easier each time...
Hair and beard were done within Blender using the static particles features
OK, so here we go now.
C H A P T E R 1 - B A S I C S H A P E O F T H E H E A D
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At first, extrude (E-KEY) the base plane a few times, using G-KEY and S-KEY in order to get the proper starting shape. You can also download the according blend file here. Anyway, modelling these basic shapes should not prove too difficult for you, unless you are a new blender user. In this case, you should read some basic tutorials about Blender Creator first.
You should also set the camera view in order to have a fair prespective view from the head-to-come, and set a few lights. I choosed to place a cold blue lamp in the background, and a warm red lamp in the foreground, to get more colour contrast during the intermediate rendering of the head. During all the following steps, using the Z-KEY in order to toggle between the edged view and the shaded view will help a lot. Keep this tip in mind!
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We are now about to use the SubSurf tool. Shift to the F9 Edit buttons, with the head selected, and set the SubDiv option to 1 and then press the SubSurf button. That's it! You now have a more accurate basic shape for you to work with!
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Now, we will turn the SubSurf into a real mesh using the ALT+C combo. Choose 'Mesh (keep original)' to the popup requester 'Convert SubSurf to'. Then press the X-KEY in order to delete the original mesh. You now have only the basic shape on the screen.
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Press again the SubSurf button, and turn the SubSurf into a real mesh once again, and clear the original mesh exactly the same way as in Step 03.