I am making a character head and am confronted with a problem that arises every time I try to finish the model.
I model the face first and then expand with polygons around the face to make the middle and back of the head. The problem is that it doesn’t need to be as detailed as the face and I would like to get ride of these extra-edges without creating a lot of triangles (I look really bad when smoothing things out).
Here is the example I am working on :
You see, I don’t know what to cleanly close the hole!
Move some of the loops together, then use “Remove Doubles” to get rid of the extra verticies (And with that, faces)
As for the tris, try removing the loop that starts behind the ear, and one of the loops that starts at the corner of the eye (Looks like you’ve got a tri that you can get rid of there.)
Also, at the top of the neck you have a quad that is somewhat skewed (This isn’t good either) You could get rid of this by removing one loop around the back of the head, along with one loop down the side of the neck… the result should stay nice and even.
In reducing the number of edge loops you can always go from an odd number of edge loops to one and still maintain quads. 7 to one is about the practical limit. Subdivide a plane a few times and try making the following figures by merging verts (alt-m) and joining some triangles to form quads at the transition from one to many loops.
Finally, I found another solution, I used the extra-edges to start making the ear and it works pretty well. To clean things up, I am going to use your “pattern”… I tried it and it smooths okay.
