Can I ask for your expertize?

[sHAdowgAme]

Check out this face modeling tutorial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xls25e08sSg

I wouldn't recommend using splines for anything but hard surface modeling. It is a very archaic way of doing things and your model will not look as organic. Start with a plane and cut and extrude until you get the basic shape of the eyes and mouth, and then keep on going from there. Watch out for areas where 5 or more edges meet at a single vertex. Animators hate those. just remember you want good smooth edge flow, and to keep adjusting everything every time you make another cut or ad an edge into the geometry. Check out the video!

A good way to learn modeling and texturing for games is to start out making assets for older platforms, like PS1 or PS2. Do some research and find out what the poly/texture budget was back then (i think for textures the largest for ps1 was 32x32 for your average background prop and 64x64 for your average character)

Just something to think about. The wheel looks good, btw.

[jb3]

Ah, see... now that's helpful. The tutorial is indeed really good. I need to watch it a few times.

Yes, as I said several times, I probably use archaic methods. I'll undoubtedly achieve the same result, but why do it 4 times longer wasting energy?

Shadowgame: I don't want to bore everyone, but did you try NURBS? Are they popular?

LOL, no way. I'm not going to do stuff for the older platforms. I did Thief and I don't believe it's a good trend to go back.

[sHAdowgAme]

Studios that do still use nurbs mainly use them for hard surface objects like cars, ships, etc.
They also still used by some studios mainly for cinematic and movies. As far as game goes, I still find some use for them in making hard surface objects, but you still have to convert the end product to polygons.
Does that help?

[jb3]

Yes, thanks.

From what you say I take it that the famous nurbs didn't really make any significant revolution, but they are used to do some specific jobs. Like you said hard surface objects.