if we go through all the trouble of making a hi-rez figure ....wouldnt it make more sense to increase the vertex count only in areas where they are needed...such as elbows/shoulders/knees/hip-thigh joint area/ or around eyes/mouth/or nose as shown here(just a quick example for the purpose of illustration)...admitedly it is more work than selecting a whole mesh and hitting 'meshsmooth' but since when was it necessary to do things the quick easy way?

That, among other things, is what Vicki and Michael do. Thing is that the Hi-Res character would kill most computers for scenes with a few people etc. I heard that the smoothed head was in the area of 30K polygons and the entire vickie figure is around 30K or so ... And that file is dang big enoughfor most thigns ...

I'm trying to get a poly count on the head now. As for doing selcet areas, that is great but then you would have to cpmpletely redo the morph targets for it. If you just go with the meshsmooth option, all you have to do is import each morph target as an obj and apply the same pNurbs to it. The other way, when you imported each morph target as an obj, you would have to selectively change each and every exact little change you made perfectly. I have over 200 morphs for this guy. I would rather it be a simple task and than a tedious one. And I don't think the head is as bad as described but yes, it does slow the system a bit.

Standard male head: 8176 polys. Hi-res male head: 34000 polys.

Incidently, I bet the mesh above has bad edges. See where the subdivided mesh has a vertice in the middle of each triangle on the old mesh - the vertice is only on the new mesh, it needs to be connected to one of the vertices on the old mesh too, else holes will open if the mesh is distorted in any way.