Tutorial 8 - Ear Creation

A very difficult piece of geometry and very complex.
Use a similar method that we did for the face for the ear.
Load reference image, and define some key areas.
From this point we want to start drawing in the topology, same idea as before, connecting the lines, and making new ones. Create the necessary quads. Don’t worry about making this too complex. Take this into 3D Max and start sculpting the ear.

Load the head into Max. F4 you can see all the edges of the face. Select the head and hide. Uncheck hide frozen objects. Go into left view and zoom in. It is very pixelated, so need to change the resolution of the downloaded texture size. Max uses a standard size, so we need to override this setting via customise menu. Customise > preferences > configure driver. Download texture size – match bitmap size, ok.
Material editor, have reference plain texture. Click on diffuse M and underneath file name for the bitmap, click reload. The detail is much crisper.
Create shapes line, both set to corner, start drawing the quads again. Can put on snaps to make life easier. Work your way around the geometry. Attach quads to make a surface. Select one quad > modify > edit poly > attach. Vertex mode click and drag over vertices –weld.

Line the ear up with the front reference plain. Pull out the vertices to fit the image as you did before with the face. Alt X to make the model semi transparent. Line up the outer ring of the ear, and then the inner ear.

Look at the reference image, edge mode, select the edges that you wish to bring forward or back, and trace around the ear canal area. When selected on the right hand side pick on chamfer, just a small amount to make a border around the edges. Need to clean up the corners. Edit ,select the smaller edge, edit geometry > collapse which gets rid of the annoying corners.

Polygon mode > edit poly > inset mode. For this you do not have to use inset chamfer.
Add turbo smooth modifier onto the ear to help the representation. Click on see end result so that you can see the high resolution model while you are modelling.