Part 7 Lend Me Your Ears

I hate making ears, I always have hated making ears, and I most likely will always continue to hate making ears. I have long supported the action of removing ears at birth and replacing them with simple metal cones just to make life easier for modelers, but I don't think that will catch on with the rest of society.

The following should give you an idea of what it takes to make an ear, but the exact details vary greatly depending on the shape of the ear you're making and the exact geometry you have where it connects. I try to keep it as low poly as I can but you often end up with more geometry in the ear than the head so you may spend a great deal of time adding and deleting edges to clear up triangles hidden in the back. Always remember: Undo is your bestest friend in the world.

Details

• You'll want to use your head for reference while placing vertices for the ear, but you don't want to select it by accident, so put it on its own layer.
• Set the layer to Template once you've settled on the geometry around the ear. I had to make a couple adjustments and add another edge loop first.
• Use Create Geometry Tool to outline the ear. In this case I only had two vertices on the head where the ear would attach at the front, so I only placed two vertices at the front and at the back. If there were three on the front I would have also placed three on the back. I also placed two on the top and the bottom, although I may split it vertically down the center later if I feel it needs the extra geometry.
• Center pivot and rotate the ear to match from the front view.
• Extrude the outside of the ear to give it some thickness.
• Extrude the inside of the ear, pull it towards the head and scale it down.
• Delete the center face that you just extruded as well as the faces on the front. I delete these to ensure that the front of the ear is flush with the side of the head. If you don't it tends to look like a Mr. Potatohead ear that just got slapped on.
  
  Also, make sure you pay attention to whether or not the earlobe is attached or not. If it's detached then the front of the earlobe not the front of the ear, so don't delete that polygon. It doesn't need to be flush with the head.
• Snap vertices to the head wherever it seems to make sense. You will end up with triangles here but they can be dealt with later. I managed to snap everything onto the vertices of a single polygon but it doesn't always work out like that.
• Many of your vertices have been snapped together on the ear so select them and merge them. Just the vertices on the ear, though. You can't attach them to the head yet. (Why, yes, that does tend to confuse a lot of students I've worked with a lot of the time.)
• Use Split Polygon Tool to break that great big polygon on the outside of your ear into quads. This is why you needed the same number of vertices at the back as at the front. Otherwise you'd end up with triangles.
• fix the triangles behind the ear. I can't tell you how to do this. It depends on the geometry. I suggest you save a version of this file and then just start experimenting if you're unsure about how to do this. Add edges and delete edges and see what works. This part always takes me the longest. In fact, I increased the playback of the video from double time to triple, just so you didn't have to flounder around for the entire ordeal. I also had a couple triangles along the front of the ear, but they went away pretty fast after a vertical split and a couple edges deleted.
• Select the faces on the outside of the ear and extrude them, scaling down. We'll match these with the inside edge of the ear. I'm not going to create all the geometry on the inside since I intend to do most of that later in ZBrush but I do like to outline the ridge that runs around the top and back of the ear and a little just above the lobe.
• Freeze transformations and delete history.
• Take your head layer out of template mode and delete any faces that stand between the inside of the head and the inside of the ear.
• Delete history on the head.
• Before you combine the meshes, check the normals on the ear. You may need to reverse them. I forgot to do this in the video and had to undo a few steps and fix that.
• Select the head and ear, combine the meshes, delete history, and merge vertices. If you can still see border edges then you forgot to reverse your normals.
• Soften edges and delete history again.
• I noticed a dark spot behind my ear. This happens sometimes when you have a lot of edges meeting in a single vertex, like what happens where the ear meets the head. I smoothed the head just to see if it stood out as much in a higher subdivision. It doesn't, so I think it'll be good enough for ZBrush and undo the smoothing.