OK -- I know there's at least loren and a couple others that have 3d experience... So I've always been interested in 3d modelling on the side (just playing around with Maya PLE). One thing I've wondered is if you are going to do facial animation, what approach do you take for modelling the mouth? Do you add a bunch of control points and actually pull the face in to make a smooth indention or do you cut a hole in the face and model addition objects to construct the inside of the mouth/lips? If I pull the mouth into the face (i.e. not cutting a hole), I often get weird creases where there's an extreme distance between two control points (the ones right on the outside of the mouth and the ones that were pulled into the mouth.

Oh -- and another thing ... There are several examples that talk about cutting a sphere in half and modeling half the face then mirroring back over so its symmetric across the middle of the face. One problem I've always run into with this is that when you mirror back over, there's always a slight seam at the mid point that I can't ever manage to make disappear completely. Part of my problem here is obviously not fully knowing the tools (don't worry, Amazon has gotten a recent investment in Maya books ). Just curious if most people use the split/mirror way or if it's better to just model the whole thing using a "pristine sphere".

ms