I’ve made a cartoony creature, and I’d like to add some more definition to its ears.
What I’d like NOT to do is add Edge Loops that extend throughout its whole body. This is a recurring issue: a creature’s muzzle/mouth/head tends to have a lot of detail, while the neck and ‘below’ not so much. So sometimes adding detail on the muzzle propagates an Edge Loop all the way to the tail. No bueno.
What’s a generic strategy to avoid such puzzles? And, in the problem at hand, how can I keep the same vertex count loops at the bottom of the ear while giving it more loops to model with?
Here’s the head and ears:
Head Only.blend (774.5 KB)
OK, here’s one way: this topology configuration allows you to go from 8 points (which is always good for subd cylinders) to 12 points, which would probably give me all the detail I need in these cartoony ears.
Maybe someone more verbal than me could construct a rule: the downward pointing “4pt triangles” consume 3 points in the mesh coming up from the bottom. So there are particular numbers of vertices you want to hit when you are trying to do this type of topology expansion. In this case, “four more verts” was key.
Eight-to-twelve.blend (794.2 KB)
Note this is also symmetrical: if you take just half dividing along the Y axis you are going from 5 to 7 verts. So flattened out, you can always consume or absorb 2 verts in mesh with mismatching numbers, and still remain all quads. Note that as an open-ended cylinder you’ll have to crank up the subds to remove render artifacts. (Sometimes this is an issue in tutes that don’t specifically mention the # of verts you REQUIRE to accomplish certain meshes.)
I’ll know in a couple hours if there are other modeling issues.
Good one. Now I’m going to try and roll 2 of these into cylinders.
What would be really handy is a way to equally distribute the edge points along their edges, like the bottom verts in your example, that is, they need to be equally distanced for my application.
Equally distanced from left to right?
Just copy/paste the proper axis values.
That’s not it: there should be a facility for distributing multiple points equally along a line. It’s a common tool in other s/w.
In fact, LoopTool’s ‘Space’ command should do it but for some reason isn’t working.
It’s working now that I’ve upgraded to 2.83. ::shrug::
BTW, ztreem, what tool do you use to capture your animated gifs? -tnx
Good that it solved it self. 
I use shareX for all my screencaptures. It does everything you need and more.
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