Greetings and salutations! Today I will show how I approach the ear and finish the rest of the face. The ear is probably the second hardest part of the head to do, right after the eyes. For me to do the ear correctly, I have to understand the structure of its many individual parts. This is where research and a good understanding of anatomy comes in. Since I've modeled a few ears before, I have developed a way in which I approach modeling the ear.
What I usually do is I envision the ear as different parts and model them in a particular order, depending upon the subject and how many polygons I need for the model. For Aphrael, I started with the outer part of the ear. and then worked my way inward as shown below:
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| The outer ear. |
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| Working inward. |
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| The ear complete. |
I did not go into super detail here with the geometry because I want the normal map to drive that detail. I only modeled the minimum amount necessary for the normal map to play nice with the geometry. With the ear done, I can add it to the current face mesh so I can model the rest of the head with the ear later.
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| The t-face with ears. |
Now for the rest of the face. First I focus on creating the edge flow for the cheek muscles that run from the eyes to the mouth. It is these muscles that control the shape of the mouth during smiling, frowning, and the sort.
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| The cheeks added. |
After that, the bottom half of the mouth edge loops are added and then the main border loop around the face that forms the "mask" is added.
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| The face completed. |
There you have it. The face and ears are now complete at 458 quads and very clean edge loops. Next post for Aphrael will be the completion of the cranium to finish the head so stay tuned!
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