3D Modeling Topology Basics

[Music] all right so now that we are familiar with the general modeling tools we can go ahead and start talking about topology so if this is the first time but you're going into the 3d world and you're interested in creating cars robots or environments basically all of those objects are started right here so this is the beginning of everything and having solid understanding and great foundation of topology is going to help you so much and your future projects so what I'm trying to do here is we're gonna actually try and keep this very very simple and just stick to the very basics because this is a huge topic and we are going to talk about it more in depth later but for now let's just pretend that we are all complete beginners and we just need the basic explanation of what to look for what is the difference between the two and why the plane or good topology is important all right so what we have here on the left side is a clean and good topology and here on the right side we have bad apology so the difference between the two the one on the Left called clean or good apology is going to be easier to calculate so it's going to be easily manipulated meaning that it's a very very predictable in terms how you form your details and your shapes and it's going to be easily deformed and it's always going to look good on curved surfaces and one on the right basically has nothing of that and to just set it into perspective let's say you have a brand-new car and you like how your highlights going through the hood of a car or the door so when you open the door and then you see the light going through that opening so the movement will show the high light and basically there will be no lumps or bumps on that surface as soon as somebody hits you or by accident somebody let's say with another car comes and hits you in the door it will be full of this little bumps and basically we'll see that via highlights so the highlights will show you where the bump is and this is a difference so this is let's say the door of brand new car and this is the door that will show you the highlights of a car that has a pump and its doors so to just again to see it and maybe even better in perspective we will just now apply to twist or bend the former's to each of them and even though that they now look the same the moment you deform you will see what is the difference in the structure so let's go to nonlinear and I will just apply to us here it's like this one hit g2 applied it again and let's now twist this one and let's see how the highlight behaves so basically the highlight it's going to be complete all the way and there's not going to be the ending the formation on the surface if I go to the to this one and apply the same the formation you will now see that highlights will be broken and that whatever whatever we have let's say this sort of closed polygons together a lot of edges going into one single point from one point spreading us aside then we have a one triangle here whatever we have that you will see that we will get a break in that highlight so basically this again is the difference between the two just very very simple example and now if you will it's a modeling a car or modeling a robot you probably do not want to have those bumps on your model you want to have it clean and you want to have that surface very very very smooth basically so this is what our goal is so what are we searching for here so what are we going to do is we're going to always look for quads and quads up polygons with four sides meaning that they will have four points and they will have four edges and then they will form a quad and this is what we're gonna search all the time whatever we do we are always trying to form a quad whatever we are doing we are trying to do avoid em guns and then gun is a polygon with one two three four five points or edges so one two three four five this one has five edges so this is what we are avoiding and a triangle we are also avoiding for now and triangle has three points or three edges all right so that we know that we know what we are searching for and what I be avoiding also a plus will be is that we are trying to organize our edges in a fashion that they have more or less even spacing so as you can see here all of the polygons are the same size sometimes they do not really have to be the same size it's more about proportion and C's evenly spacing them out because the more even though they are again better they will deform and the better they will look on the curved surfaces here what we have is a lot of uneven spaces so small triangle here and then a quad here and then it's very very uneven so this is again something else that we gonna search so the more even more even though the apology or geometry is the better it will calculate and the better it will deform so what I mean is that we don't always have to search for even out it's just important that we spread it out evenly so again maybe it's too confusing but I can show you so this also now goes into the topic that this topology is also very predictable meaning that whatever I select to an inch loop you will see that this flow of edges and this flow of edges will just tell me that I can just simply add there a new edge without any problems and it will just create new clean geometry on top so if the foundation is good anything that we create on top as you can notice it will become it will still be very clean and organized on the other side if I try to do the same thing so if I now try to do an edge you will see that it will be all over the place and it's going to be very hard to imagine where do I want to have my details and the thing is if I now start to continue add more and more geometry it will become more and more messy so it will just grow again exponentially so if you have a clean geometry from the beginning chances are you will whatever you build on top it will still be clean and let's now also talk about adding let's say details and like I said easily manipulate a geometry is that know for example I want to add a detail here that has let's say this look and the thing is now I have here a polygon that is fairly large and here that it's fairly small so what we can do is just even that's pacing a bit so this is also something that we're gonna always try to watch out for it's just even that spaces and make sure that specific edge flow continues that flow so think of it as a ripple if you throw a stone in the water and then the ripples that come from that it will just slowly like fade out and here we're trying to do the same thing slowly just create that small fall-off and even though that let's say here or there still more or less and in the same in the same size now here's a bit larger so what we gonna do we will always try to find situations to fix and that or add multiple edges so now we added this edge right here and even though there is a triangle but whatever there is a triangle and a quad we can always fix that by simply adding another loop and you will see that this loop will always stop on triangles so this loop stops on triangle and here we have a quad and then it's going to continue but if it stops on triangle right here I will just middle collect go to vertex and then we have a quad so maybe it's not visible now but if I maybe move this edge actually I wanted to slide this edge and if I want to slide this one now we'll see that we have a quad and if I select this you will now see that we have perfect loop right here and then if you want to we can now create a detail or we can add simply one more loop inside so it's just going to be easier again easily manipulated and very predictable in what we do so if I now decide let's say to add a detail here I can simply do that like so so this is what I meant that it's going to be very very easily easily manipulated so maybe we can just go she steps back and let me try extrude again it's going to be maybe easier to see what we did and there we are so but if you would like to do the same thing here this is now going to be a very very difficult because we have no idea where this loop is and where to even begin so like I mentioned this one is going to be much more predictable than this one so if you would need this detail here what we will need to do first is clean everything up so there's also one other thing that I would like to say the better understanding of topology you have it is going to be easier for you to break those rules and make them work your way so for example you notice here that both of the objects are exactly the same shape but they act different than the formation meaning if you can create a shape so if we all say creating a robot and I just want to be focused on the shape first and then later I'm going to think about apology I can do that because we now let's say we have good understanding how apologies so we know how to fix it but if we're still in the learning process it is just good to practice good topology first and then think about the shape but in general later when you're bit more experienced we're gonna think about the shape first and then let's say fixing topology later so let's see how we can fix this the way that I approach fixing topology is that I always remove things and that I do not need and that are maybe not as crucial to - let's - let's say the curvature if let's say the specific shapes are affecting the curvature and then I would leave them actually I would yeah I would leave them but if they are not affecting the curvature yes I think I lost my train of thought and anyway what I wanted to say if for example we have couple of polygons that are affecting the curvature I would maybe leave them and then rework around them but if the damage is a a bit higher okay so maybe what I wanted to do let me add here insert edgeloop tool' and then let's add how much edge loops that is 1 2 3 4 5 so like that alright so now we have our topology back and again I lost my pen I thought what I was saying is that like you've seen here I removed everything that was basically here on the top if we would have would say situation maybe I can actually go a couple of steps back just just to show you because maybe it's difficult to understand okay so let me show you an example what I mean the forum let's go to nonlinear and let's bend this so this is bending now like this and we have a lot of deformation on the surface and now we'll just look what is my main curve and my main curve is this right here and I can also notice that these edges are my structural edges because they are holding the curve so then I would leave and everything else I could remove so meaning that everything else is vertical and every vertical edge I can remove and then we populate it back and this I can leave so I hope that makes sense and we're going to do that right now so because these are just a structural I will not move them because let's say we talk about curved surface but everything here I can just simply double-click and then remove and then repopulate it back later and again we're just now cleaning up the mess and then we can bring in this back and now we have clean geometry again and if we come here and apply the same the former now nonlinear Bend now it will Bend properly we haven't touched any of the structural edges and we just removed the ones that were let's say problematic and then we brought them back in a proper way and now that we have that then we can focus in the same way like we did before we can start playing and let's say trying to find interesting places where we can add details let's say something like that we can add this little bevel here do a small offset add some thickness and there we are so now we have the same situation like we have here so again just in in short we are always searching for quads we are always searching for ideally even out a distribution of edges and meaning that's more or less that each every polygon is the same size it doesn't have to but we are ideally searching for that and it's simply going to be done easily deformed easily calculated it's gonna look great on curved surfaces so even now if you come here and let's say I want to use Bend the former here so let's use a nonlinear let's use Bend and actually I didn't can select that and if we check how it looks subdivided it is still going to look good on a curved surface and if we by any chance have let's say not as good topology we will just try to see what edges or which points are our structural points and try to work around those and if not in many situations it's just easier to rebuild the objects properly and then and do the proper topology later so again this is just a very very short and trust me very brief introduction in what topology is and how should we behave and what to look out for but we're going to talk about it more in depth in future videos for sure but for now I'm going to close this topic and I'm going to see you in the next video

Channel: Elementza

Views: 10,602

Keywords:

Id: GeCZxFavFeg

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019