'ears to you

[R Reynolds]

I've started building my next actor and have decided that she's going to have believable ears. A number of human A:M models have been made available over the years.

Jim Talbot made a low patch count ear with Wonder Woman because they were hidden by her hair. For the same reason the ears on Den Beauvais' Lambrina are only good at a distance. Jim Talbot got closer with Lady Goodbody and the Jungle Queen with ears that were incorporated into the skull mesh but they still don't stand up to arm's length scrutiny. I tried my best on the business man with a hi-res normal view of an ear as a rotoscope but his ears are only sort of convincing in a normal view because I couldn't get the depth right.

So I purchased a ridiculously hi-res poly model of a female head and used one of its ears as a template.

At left is shown the rear, side and front view of the template. The next image shows a rendering of how well I was able to match the spline model (in tan) with the poly template (in grey). The only place where my model deviates from the poly model is that my ear has a real ear canal. The next image is a rendering of the attached ear model which includes a chunk of surrounding skull with all the connecting splines. The last image is a normal view of the model with Average Normals ON and Normal Weight = 50.

ear_basic.mdl