Abstract: An automatic procedure is presented to generate a multiresolution head model from sampled surface data. A generic control mesh serves as the starting point for a fitting algorithm that approximates the points in an unstructured set of surface samples, e.g. a point cloud obtained directly from range scans of an individual. A hierarchical representation of the model is generated by repeated refinement using subdivision rules and measuring displacements to the input data. Key features of our method are the fully automated construction process, the ability to deal with noisy and incomplete input data, and no requirement for further processing of the scan data after registering the range images into a single point cloud.