Modeling head, hair and body

 I watched videos from Lynda.com to help make my character. Ryan Kittleson leads you through this playlist. He's very helpful and explains things very well.

I drew two different pictures. They are of the same person. I drew one in a front view and then the other in a profile view. These are used as references so I don't make the head all blocky and keeps it from looking weird and unhuman. So these reference images I drew are really important.
From these images I will make only half of the head so I don't have to work harder to get the head looking right. With Maya I can make just half the head and I'll be ok.

This is my blocky head that I made wrong. The error I somehow made was I started with a cube instead of a plane like i was supposed to. Just so you know, it is MUCH easier with a plane. So what we learned here is do what the tutorials tell you to do and be careful what you click on. It saves time.
What I did was start with the mouth. I used extrude to get the basic shape and to get the area that will be used to house the teeth. From 
there I added edge loops so I could make the nose and get basic flow zones for the mouth. Next I made the eye. It is made almost exactly like the mouth. That was really easy. But now you really have the basic facial structure for your character.

This picture is from the redone model from a PLANE. Once the blocky head is achieved you can start moving vertices around to make it look like a human instead of a block. The reference images are so important when moving the verts around. This makes sure that everything will end up looking normal. Once everything is looking good you can extrude the top of the head to make the forehead, the back of the head, the ares that will be the ear, & the neck. You use the reference images to make sure that the head is maintains the right shape and to make sure the neck isn't to thick or nonexistent. That is really important. But once this step is done you will be ready to mirror the geometry and get a full head.

 This is the back of the eye. I basically took a sphere and made an eye shape with it. Then I pulled some of the previously made faces back to create the eye lids. It was difficult. But I got it! I moved the vertices to surround the shape that sufficed as the eyes. then I used the sculpt geometry tool to make the appropriate creases that define the eye area. It helped make the face look more realistic.

 This is the body. It basic terms it is half a cylinder. Then I deleted half of it to make it. Then I extruded an arm and a leg. Then I moved the shoulder up so I can properly put in the Human IK rig. This is the basic shape. I won't add much to it because I want to do more details in the clothing. So I'm pretty much done with the body.






This is my hand as of Friday night. I made a box and took parts of the side to pull out the thumb. I added edge loops as necessary to make it look that good smoothed over. Then I made one finger. I will duplicate it to save me the effort of making more.

This is all I accomplished this deadline. So I didn't quite meet this deadline. I found out just how hard this is and how much effort this takes. It's hard. Know this before you start making a 3-D character.