I basically took the male player model generated with the shelf in Houdini 16, and scrapped most of the facial features, attempting to make a smooth, featureless surface for the model's face instead. It's an art style that I'm attempting to imitate from some other low-poly games, such as Absolver or Ashen.

I've done plenty of research and looked into tutorials regarding the basics of Houdini, so I think I have a mediocre grasp on the program, but every attempt I've made to smooth the facial features seems to fail. No guide currently exists for it, as far as I can tell. I tried to just run a low-opacity deform and sculpt over the face, but that doesn't do what I want it to do, so I moved onto other methods. Then I tried fusing the facial points and running a smooth tool, over and over again, and that also gave me less than stellar results, on top of being node-heavy and time consuming. So then I went onto using curves. I liked the look of the curves being lofted individually, but when I attempt to apply the tool over more than 3 curves, I get garbled results that are not smooth. I figured the loft tool was attempted to loft each curve to each other, and because I couldn't find a toggle to make it consecutively apply the effect or anything, I thought I could circumvent this problem by applying the loft tool to each pair of curves. The first few worked, but then I was given a similar result to if I had just applied the effect across all curves. I've extensively looked at the spreadsheet to make sure the coordinates weren't doing anything funky. All of my curves are of the same type. I've seen a few videos of people using the loft tool, and it seems I'm using it right, but I'm probably wrong.

So, a few questions, I guess. Am I just missing something with the loft tool here? Should I just give up on this method and use something else? And if so, how would you guys handle this project?

I'll link the project file, in case anyone is using Houdini 16 and wants to see what I'm doing wrong. I also posted two screenshots, one of the individual lofting issue and the other being what happens when I loft all the points at once.

Hi,

If you are lofting, the skin sop is the right tool, but all curves should have the right direction. If you already have you curves and don't want to change the direction manually, you can still group your curves with some logic which usually case dependent.
In your case I would compare the first and the last curve points Y-Position. When you have the group, which is applied on the prims, then you can use it in the reverse sop. After using it, all curves should have the same direction.

This isn't the most gorgeous geo in the world, but will this do?

@mrCatfish I did try just fusing the face edges together and sculpting them to a more natural shape, but I can't seem to understand how to successfully sculpt, even when I lowered the intensity of the brush, so I decided to use curve modeling instead. Thanks though!