Modeling: the ear

Ask just about any beginning modeler (and many experienced ones) and they’ll tell you that the ear is a challenge! There are so many turns and folds in the human ear that it poses a modeling nightmare. But, that being said, it is also an excellent exercise in clean modeling. The ear alone, once successfully tackled, will make you a better modeler all around.

The way we are going to go about this is much the same way we got started with the edgeloops:

1. Position your 3D Cursor at the center of the ear from both the Front and the Side views
2. Add a new plane with Spacebar > Add > Plane
3. Extrude along the outer shape of the ear

We are working strictly from the Side View for the first bit.

Use the same process of extruding and moving to do the top, inside portion of the ear:

Watch your topology closely, it can become very messy, very fast!

Continue for the bottom:

The next step is to rotate your view around with your MMB to a nice angle and Extrude out along the X-axis:

1. Select the main loop of the ear
2. E > Region
3. Before placing the new faces, hit X to lock the movement to the X-axis.

From here it’s just a matter of shaping the ear by moving vertices around to get the proper depth and definition on the ear. It will also save you some time editing if:

1. Select the whole ear by hovering your mouse over it and hitting L
2. Hit R > Z to rotate along the Z-axis
3. Then do the same along the Y-axis, R > Y

This will just better position the ear.

Connecting the ear to the head can be a bit of challenge, due to the much higher number of vertices it is made up of in comparison to parts of the head. This can be solved by using some cleaver modeling techniques. Let’s start by extruding in the outside edge of the ear to create the back side:

Now is where it gets tricky, best to just follow the screenshot:

You will notice that I have used the direction of my edges coming in from the eye to increase my face count, thus making it easier to connect the ear.

One of the general rules of thumb when it comes to good topology is to stay away from triangles. We want to keep our mesh comprised of strictly quads, or faces with four sides to them.

Once again, we can use the same techniques seen before, and some of the tricks we just used on the ear to connect the back of the ear to the head:

You will notice that I have disabled the mirror modifier’s display while in Edit Mode, this makes working on the inside of the head much easier. This can be done via the modifier panel.

Final: tweaking

And that’s it! After connecting the ear to the head the model is essentially finished. At this point it is a good idea to give your whole model the once over, checking it out from all different angles, perspective vs. orthographic modes, etc. If you find yourself needing to tweak the proportions (almost always do) a really easy way to do it is by using the Proportional Editing tool, which can be accessed by hitting O. This allows you to move the mesh around with a fall-off, basically a magnet, such that anything within the radius will move with your selection.

Here is the final model:

Conclusion

Thank you all for reading this and I hope you have found it helpful in your head modeling endeavours. At this point, the best thing you can do is…do it all over again! Repetition in any kind of modeling always helps, but it’s particularly true with head modeling. Also, always use references to help you along. You may hear some people telling you not to use references, that it makes your work stale and unoriginal. This is absolutely not true (assuming you’re not just copying down the image and calling it your own…). References are an excellent resource, for everything from proportion, to perspective, to anatomy, etc. If used properly, it will show in your work, they really do help.

From here, just keep hacking away at it, thanks for reading and best of luck!

Happy blending!

If you have read this article you may be interested to view :

• Modeling, Shading, Texturing, Lighting, and Compositing Soda Can in Blender 2.49: Part 1
• Modeling, Shading, Texturing, Lighting, and Compositing Soda Can in Blender 2.49: Part 2
• Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 1
• Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 2
• Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 3
• Creating Convincing Images with Blender Internal Renderer-part1
• Creating Convincing Images with Blender Internal Renderer-part2
• Textures in Blender