Quote - Fastest method would have been sculpting then retopology. You could have sculpted the form in less than an hour and started your final retopology right after, leaving the rest of your time for the UV/texture portion. It's fast becoming the omre popular way to create content.

That's exactly what I ended up doing.  The 5 hours was the entire alcove model, from start to finish (except for unwrapping and texturing). 

As for the horse heads, I originally planned to use edge extrusion over a photo, as I show in the screencaps on the previous page.  I'm very comfortable with edge extrusion techniques, as I feel it provides the ultimate control over countouring and profile shaping.  Max has some tools to make edge/poly modeling very efficient, and in some cases, it's exactly the same techniques and tools used in retopology, minus the step of actually sculpting something first.

Ultimately, however, I wasn't satisfied with my reference material.  Didn't have enough ref photos to work with, so I achieved the final result of the horse head using Sculptris to rough out a quick sculpt in about 15 minutes, then imported that into 3dsmax, and used the native retopology tools to build a nice quad version of the mesh in about 20 minutes.  Then I just simply subdivided, and refined that shape a bit using standard subD techniques.  I finished the horse head in under an hour.

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