Creating the ears

Guide

Topology

I started by drawing guidelines and topology lines to help when creating  the ears. I set these up as reference plates in 3ds Max and then used splines to draw these out in the same way as I did for the face.

I then converted one to a editable poly and attached the other splines to it.

The next step is to move the vertices to create the shape of the ear.

Extending the head (continued)

Here I have continued modelling the rest of the back of the head and shoulders.

When creating the topology for the back of the head I noticed some areas where I could simplify the mesh on the face section that I had modeled. I selected the edges and then used remove to remove the selected edges.

I did this in two places, once on the forehead and then again on the cheek.

The above image shows how far I have got modelling my head. The modelling of this part is nearly finished, I just need to finish modelling the neck and shoulders.

Modelling the back of the head is taking longer than I had expected but after this is complete there is not much more modelling as only the ear needs to be created and attached to the head.

Extending the head

The next step is to create the back of the head and neck. The back of the head will be modelled separately and joined to the face, the same method will also be used for when modelling the ear. First I started by drawing some topology guidelines for the back of the head and then loaded these into 3DS Max.

New reference plate

With the new reference plates loaded I added a sphere into the scene, rotated it so the poles were facing the side (where the ears will be) and scaled it to the shape of my head. I adjusted the amount of segments in the sphere so that there were the same amount as the topology on the head.

I deleted polygons from the sphere to start to shape head. I deleted the inner polgons on the side of the head as well as the ones covering the face and half of sphere as a symmetry modifier will be applied later.

I turned on snap to vertex and moved the vertices at the front of the head so that they lined up with the ones for the face with the use of soft selection.

Next I selected every other edge around the sphere and then clicked ring to select all the edges in that ring. I then clicked collapse to remove these edges and simplify the structure of the head.

I started to create more edges by holding shift and dragging the existing edges and then moving the vertices to the topology guides that I had drawn.

The image above shows how far I have got with this stage of modelling my head. I will continue to work on this section and then join it to the front of the head.

Spline modelling

With the reference plates loaded in and the viewport set to the front view I traced the topology using a splines. Using splines make it easier to just draw the points on top of the guides. I set up the spline so that it would only create straight corners and not curves.

I turned on snap and set this to vertex. This made it easier to trace the topology and made sure that the vertices were lined up exactly.

When trying to trace over some of the smaller parts of the topology the mouse snapped to the wrong vertex. I solved this by going to the snap settings adjusting the snap radius.

I traced all of the topology and then selected one of the spline shapes and converted it to an editable poly.

I then used the attach button to attach all of the other spline sections together into one editable poly. Even though all the splines now belonged to the same editable poly the vertices were not joined. I used weld to join the overlapping vertexes together creating one mesh.

Next I lined up the vertices down the middle of the face by selecting them and then selecting make planar on the x axis. This will make sure that these vertices are straight for when using a symmetry modifier later.

Following the guide for the topology that I had created in the previous step made sure the topology was correct. This part was quite easy as the topology had already been planned out so it was just a case of tracing the guides.

Guidelines and Topology lines

After having prepared the images for the reference plates, the next thing to do was to draw on guides for the topology.

First I started by drawing guidelines onto the image to outline the main features of the face. These guides (blue) were used to help draw the topology guidelines.

Using the guidelines then drawn before I drew the lines for the topology (red). I made sure that there were no quads so that the mesh would deform correctly and there would be no problems with the subdivision. The topology for the nose and top of the eye caused some trouble but by using the video tutorial as a guide this wasn’t too much of a problem.

This part was quite hard and took a long time as I had to make sure that all of the polygons were quads, they flowed correctly and also took account for the shape of the face. Although this was difficult I persevered as planning now will pay off when modelling the head as the topology will be clearly thought out before hand

The reference plates are now finished and will be brought into 3DS Max as a guide for creating the model.