Ears

Ears!!!

What’s a character with no ears, they wont be able to hear their enemies!!!

For the characters to be complete they need to have ears that will require further modeling in 3ds max. The ear is a detailed part of the head but with a few simple steps it can be created and made to look rather complicated with time.

The first step when creating the ear is to start with a standard box object in 3ds max. Once the box has been created the first step is to make the box an editable poly. Once this has been done you can then edit the box to look like a sort of bean shape, this can be done by simply adjusting the vert’s of the box in each corner.

After this has been completed its time to get out the cut tool and begin to draw the shape of the ear onto the box. This can be achieved by using reference images and doing some research on typology. The reason why the ear is created from a box is it makes it easier to draw or cut out shapes and after the ear is complete it gives a very good base or starting point for when the ear needs to be attached to the rest of the mesh.

Once the ear has been drawn it’s now time to extrude and bevel so that the ear can begin to take shape. The first part of the ear that should be extruded would be the outer rim part of the ear that gives the ear its identity. So by selecting the poly’s that needs to be extruded first and extruding them to a realistic size so the ear doesn’t look to deep. Since its in a slight bean shape some of the shape wont will be left out towards the final edge.

Once this step has been completed before any further steps are take the user should first fix up there ear and add more vert’s and or poly’s so that the ear can look a little more rounded without adding any smoothing groups or smooth’s to the ear. This will make the ear loom even more detailed when adding the smooth’s to it.

The last big step would be to bevel the inside of the ear, which gives the ear more detail. Once this is beveled its then the choice of the user if they require any further editing or if they will leave the ear as it is and add a turbo smooth.  For this project a little more editing was done to the ear to give it a more detailed look but this was manly through extrusions and the push and pull method.