The first pass on the head left me with just the right-hand half of the head consisting of 394 polygonal faces, or 788 for the complete head; way to many to pass on to Pepakura to make a pattern. The next step was therefore to optimise the design by manually reducing the number of polygons thereby reducing the detail whilst at the same time retaining the intrinsic shape of the head.

A couple hours later and the right-hand half of the head had been reduced to 165 polygons. This done, the half head was mirrored to form a full head which was further optimised to give 316 polygons for the whole head.

Metasequioa 4 has the ability to create multi-sided polygon not just triangles and quadrilaterals which would allow significant further reductions in individual polygons, however I have found that Pepakura Designer has an issue with rendering these shapes when the model is unfolded, so I tend to stick with three and for sided shapes.

Opening the design in Pepakura designer and unfolding the 3D model to a 2D pattern I was able to join and disjoin faces and reduce the the number of pieces to just 40. This is still significantly higher than I would like, but doing this first breakdown has not been a waste of time as it has revealed several areas that which need simplification and some others that can be simplified.