calling this one a failure
John, great tips. I've learned most of them the hard way already.
I don't worry too much about the occasional triangle in my quads if it gets me the geometry I am looking for. Haven't played a whole lot yet with n-gons.
For blender users: quads =4 sides; triangles=3; n-gon=more than 4 sides. Blender can use them all but when rendering n-gons they can produce weird effects and when porting to stl can create weird angles/points. But sometimes they also work fine. So a little experimenting is good when exporting or rendering for a pattern.
I also don't worry too much about joining different objects unless I am sculpting together. It is super easy to join objects together in blender.
For blender users, select the objects you want to join and then hit Ctrl-J (or join button). The different objects are now one object for editing. To separate objects go to edit mode and select the object you want to separate from the larger object by select it using L key and then press P and separate by selection.
For my lion bust effort...I am calling it a failure. I'll give myself a C- grade. I could not find a good reference image that had front and side references so tried to do it with only one image. My animal anatomy knowledge is not strong enough to fill in the holes of my modeling. I am still trying to figure out a good way to create hair for carving as well. The blender software has a wonderful native hair particle system that works great for rendering but not so much for stl exporting. Back to the drawing board or more probable another project.
-Oscar
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