We were left to our own devices for the first part of the day due to a burnt out projector, so I continued with playing with soft select on my 'goblin'. As you can see, he's looking pretty polished now and I'm pretty pleased with what that one tool can achieve. Its changed not only the ears, horns and nose etc, but I was also able to add some emotion to his face by deforming the eyebrows/eyes/mouth. I have put up the original plain head before I altered it, and my goblin as it stands now.

After this, I was able to get some help on my stumbling point on the 'helmet' project first from Toby who is already well ahead of the pack on Maya, and pointed me to some possible causes and solutions, so big thanks to him. Then my tutor, Kelvin, found that i had stacked up a few vertexes and faces on top of each other and that that was what was causing my problems. After a short time I had cleared them off and progressed with the helmet, right up to the mirroring step.