Week 5a - The Dreaded Ears

Now it's time to work on the final part of the head before I add any textures to it: the ears. This is potentially going to be very complex, perhaps even more so than the face, but since this has to be finished and handed in by Friday, it's time to dive in.

I started by adding topology lines and quads on the profile photo, just like I did with my face not too long ago:



I have a feeling that I may have done something wrong, but I didn't have enough time to worry about this as I shortly moved onto the modelling process:



Once again, this was modelled in a very similar way to the face: the quads were drawn as gridlines on 3DS Max, and joined together by the vertices. Much like when modelling the face before, I needed to simplify the quads in some places, while adding more in others, however the general shape of the ear's detail can still be seen.

After positioning the vertices to define the overall shape of the ear, it now looks like this:



It's not exactly perfect, and since I wasn't feeling too well last night, I decided to leave it for the time being and carry on with it today while I can concentrate better. The ear seems as though it's difficult to model, which is because I have only been moving the vertices around, which isn't working properly. Instead, I need to extrude some parts inwards to form the ear canal, much like I did with the nose earlier on (bear in mind that I'm not currently following the tutorial, although I did skip through some of it to see how he was doing it).

In order to help me in modelling the ear, I actually went into Photoshop and turned off the Topology and Quad layers, so that I could see the photo more clearly. After adjusting more vertices and extruding some faces, it now looks more like this...



...a horrible, blocky mess. However, it does look more like an ear - and more importantly, my own ear - than it did before. It looks much better once Turbosmoothed:



This is the closest to a perfect match with my real ear that I've been able to get, but I'm pleased with it anyway. The ear as a whole still isn't finished yet, but apparently the next stage of the tutorial is to attach it to the back of the head.

In order to do so, some of the faces on the side of the head had to be deleted to make way for the ear:



But there's still no detail behind the ear: it needs some thickness of its own. So now what I'm being instructed is to press Alt+Q to go into a 3DS Max function called Isolation mode. From here, all of the edges of the outside of ear were selected by selecting one and then clicking on the loop button.

After doing that, I pressed shift while dragging the edges along the X Axis to create copies of those edges:



As shown by the above screengrab, this has now given the ear some depth and is defining the outer edge. From here I had to continue adding faces to the back of the ear in order to create the back, and make it easier to connect it to the side of the head:



Now I can exit Isolation mode, and start attaching the ear to the head.



At the moment, I'm finding this to be the most frustrating task so far, purely because it is difficult to see where everything needs to go, even when I move the camera in place. Tune in to my next entry to hopefully see the finished head!