I found it very helpful to start from the mouth and work from there.  One of
the difficulties in using sPatch to make a head is that you end up with holes
on two ends that don't close themselves gracefully.  Two places where you
would want such holes would be inside the mouth, and the neck.  I've only
done two heads with sPatch, so I'm by no means an expert.  But I was very
happy with the second one, which I made using this method.  You can find the
picture at http://www.televar.com/~ceckak/art/enlightenment/  , and the
source for the scene as well as the spatch models is available in the irtc
archives (should be linked from the above page).

It's by no means an easy process though, or at least it wasn't for me.
I followed Anton's tutorial (which you mentioned below).  I started by
finding some pictures of a similar head off the internet, and drew out some
profile outlines in sPatch.  I dropped the profile lines to lower layers just
to use as a reference.  Then I started with an oval for the mouth, and made
the entire head through subsequent extrusions of that oval.  At each
extrusion, I would switch perspectives and make sure that it lined up with
the proviles in the background before continuing.  Then all that was left was
smoothing off some bumps.  But I spent a good month and a half working on the
entire scene, and a large part of that time was devoted to the sPatch
modeling.

Hope that's helpful.  Good luck!

Ken

"Greg M. Johnson" wrote:

> Can anyone give me any pointers on sPatch?  I've read tutorials here and
>
> there but seem unable to make non-hideous human heads. I think that this
>
> is a marvel of a program, and it works (;-) on Win98!
>
> I got the impression from reading some tutorials, perhaps those of
> Antonin Makovic (extreme apologies for mispelling a half-remembered
> name), that it is a sort of organic process that can take just an hour
> if one is good.
>
> I seem to start with an OK but oversimplified face, and then touch it up
>
> to death to the point where it is hideous.  I cannot resist the
> temptation to tilt the face back a few degrees at a time, then make all
> the points of lines straight.
>
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  [Image]

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