I probably should have mentioned this before, but the mesh on display on that earlier post was the "working" mesh (or at least, the working mesh after mirroring it.) That is to say, that's generally the mesh I deal with when I'm tweaking the topology.

Pictured here, however, is what the topology of the render mesh looks like. Also, some polycount stats for unsmoothed and smoothed meshes. Also, an embarrassing look at how terrible the teeth & gums are by comparing their polycounts. The eye & lens are essentially 4 default parameter spheres, so here's their polycounts for comparison as well.


For the render mesh, I use Maya's smooth tool with a 2x exponential setting. This doesn't happen until after everything is rigged, but it is then set to Linear with 0 additional lines (equivalent to no change from working mesh) so that I can do posing. Once I finish posing, I change it back to exponential and everything pops into smoothed as if I posed the whole thing smoothed!

One of these days, I've got to post my entire workflow... I'll put it on the list next to "comprehensive detail of texturing/shading network."