3D Modeling Tutorial #115 - Topology and Tools Review - Part 1

hello and welcome to 3d modeling video number 115 so as I was doing my daily warmup I thought why not review some things that we learned about topology just a simple review the thing is that when you create a bunch of videos a lot of the ideas can kind of mix together and you can lose some of the clarity because you have so many ideas and so many words being spoken in 70 videos so here's going to be a review on topology some of the most basic things that you need to know to get started creating some interesting hard surface models so I'll just go ahead and hide this all right so I'll just thoughtful I usually start with a plain I think this is the best way to start with just one length segment and the one width segment I'll just put it right here and center it and I'll just go right here on the object color and just give it a gray material here okay so the best way I think to start modeling something is just to go ahead and select some edges ring insert a ring set how many segments you want if you want something more complex you can go ahead and crease number of segments and then you can go on from there and of course let's go ahead and set up our symmetry modifier just going to go ahead and sort of loop through here and apply this symmetry modifier press D turn off the grid so I'll just go ahead and lift this up a little bit off the grid so all these engines that we've inserted allow us to add more details so with these other guns here I can go ahead and inset and then bevel upwards or inwards to create some nice little detail here all right let's go ahead and apply a tablespoon modifier let's go ahead and turn an Iceland display all right so here's some basic detail this kind of geometry is good for adding detail and visual interest in your hard surface geometry all right and then if you want to add a little bit of sharpness you can go in here and insert a loop through here using Swift loop tool all right so I'm going to go ahead and put a low polygon tab of symmetry and I'm going to show you how can quickly modify our detail so as you can see right now we've got this kind of detail happening with it coming down here and being you know very round however if I go ahead and slick the inside of this and inset and you know instead of loop through here as well or what I'll do is I just go ahead and remove this and start again and just go ahead and create two segments here use the pinch option to move them further apart and I'm going to go ahead and press spacebar now I've told you that the spacebar is what you use to turn on show end result but that that may not be what it sets you by the fault I can't quite remember what the default shortcuts are I know that by default Otzi is cut but I'm not quite sure what the default show end result toggle is so I use spacebar because it's just very convenient for my fingers I could just easily use my left thumb to just press spacebar and activate that but if you would like and go under customize and preferences or actually customize and customize user interface and let's see what it's called exactly show end result on or off so to find a shortcut here you can sometimes be a difficult process what you just have to know what you're looking for if you're looking for stuff up here on the graphite modeling tools it may be under poly tools and so if you're looking for for example graphite modeling tools you see under G we don't have it here so it's under a different setting it's under poly tools or ribbon modeling so let's go ahead and find the show end result on or off we'll just go under main UI all commands I'm going to go ahead and press s to skip to the S section sh just say skip to the SH segment and here we go show end result as you can see I have it set to space and just go ahead here and set a new hotkey you can press space for example and then go ahead and save it and then go ahead and load it I find that if you just set the shortcut it might not work right away be sure to save and load up your sugar shortcut configuration so this is how you can set it to be space right here so because of these changes because I've gone and inset this you can see that in oculus is a different looking result here whereas this result here is kind of smooth in the middle here the it's it's a hard edge here which just gives us a different variation of the same detail so this is how you can go about adding variation to your details it can sometimes be as easy as just in setting ok so and then if I would like this to be sharper we can go ahead and either insert a loop through here or we can use an existing loop that already exists and just move it this way as you that changes the outline of this okay so the basic lesson here is that you can have very simple geometry and once you smooth it out it will become smooth and round here but then we run into another problem is that if we start inserting loops through here if we're working on something and we start inserting loops through here so I'm going to go ahead and delete that and let's continue working here just go ahead and select these edges and just start modeling something else here so I'm going to go ahead and insert some loops through here and bevel this out delete this for now so we need edges if you're using this method you need edges to control the sharpness we need to insert additional edges to control the sharpness of your subdivided geometry however those edges will follow will keep going and they will eventually run into something like this and here is an example I want this to remain rounded but this edge from here has come over here and it has kind of destroyed the roundness so the way you deal with this is that you can find a convenient location to terminate these three edges here we need these three edges to provide sharpness here without that we get this so I want those two edges here to maintain the sharpness but I don't want them to be over here so what I will do is I'll just go ahead and weld them right here select these two edges loop and remove and I can also remove this one here I still have quads here I still have the result I want and I don't have all those extra edges going here so here's another basic topology lesson find convenient locations to eliminate edges so you want to have quads wherever possible however quads are most important when you're working on curved edges they are not so important when you have a flat surface so this is a flat surface this is a flat surface this is a flat surface these are all flat surface we we don't really have any curves here except for this right here so let's go ahead and insert a curved area or an area with some more organic smooth geometry and one more important lesson is that if I want to insert some addition geometry here if I insert a loop through here as you can see it follows all the way through here however for now I can go ahead and remove this I can go ahead and work out the quads and topology later on but for now to simplify things I'm just going to keep these two edges here because I need them or actually just go ahead and keep this one edge here and I can also just select two edges here and just create edges for them and not for the whole thing so to create that smoothness I'll go ahead and select this and delete it and I'll go ahead and remove this this edge for now if I select this edge and then loop or if I use the loop tool that's it to my shortcut it's going to go ahead and select this as well however if I go ahead and select this one and then loop it will not select that so sometimes you can simply select another edge and apply a loop again and it will not select the unnecessary parts all right and I can also remove this for now I recommend adding edges as the last thing you do all right so as the moving things around here I want these edges to be exactly right here I want this edge this vertex to be exactly right here but I can position it accurately what I can also do is right click here activate vertex snaps press s to activate that and I can snap or what I'll do here is I'll convert it two vertices first hold ctrl and click here and now you can see this blue plus appears and I can snap this vertex to this one and I'm also snapping all the selected vertices as well so I'm controlling these three vertices using this one vertex and as I move this one the rest follow suit and I can then go ahead and weld it and don't forget to press 7 to turn on your statistics here so you can see what has been welded you can see that right now it looks like one vertex here but if I select that you can see I have verts - it's telling me I have two vertices here once i weld it it says verts one so always have you statistics on to have more awareness of your geometry of the topology and I'll go ahead and turn off snaps because right now if I'm trying to model the snap can actually kind of get in the way and as you can see I'm kind getting wonky results because of my snaps so I'll go ahead and press s they deactivated I will go ahead and select these two edges and bridge them so right now I've got I'm getting a general shape here and now I'll just go ahead into border select this and cap it so here's what I've got here if I press ctrl or space it's giving me this as you can see I'm getting my smooth shape that I want here but I still need a little bit of work a little bit more work and what I'll do now is just gradually refine it until I get the shape that I want I got to work out this topology here so what I'll do is I'll just go ahead use swift loop to insert some more loops through here and then connect them press spacebar again that's just a gradual process as I refine at this point I've got an end gone here and then gone is a polygon with more than four sides cool try sore triangles have three sides quads have four sides and n-gon has five or more and you can see this one right here if I convert to edge it's got one two three four five and that's what our statistics tell us as well so to turn this into a quad I can either insert a loop through here and connect it right here or I can insert a loop through here and connect it here so those are two ways that you can turn an end gone into a quad and then you can also always get creative and another thing I can do is insert a loop through here and then connect these two vertices so I've just shown you three ways you can turn this one quad this one and gone into a quad alright and they can go and continue refining my curved shape here so I am holding space and I want it to be sharp around here so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and say loop through here and as you can see it follows the topology so when you insert a loop through here using ring and then connect or by using swift loop it is following the topology so it sees that there is and we have this edge selected we'll have an edge on the left and edge on the right and then an edge in front so it's going to go ahead and follow this and when it gets to here it's going to see that even though it has a strange shape it's not a perfect quad it has an edge on the left and edge on the right and it follows this edge right here so it's a good thing to keep in mind how the ring and connect tools will and Swift loop will react to your topology so as I insert loop through here you can see that the edge goes up here instead of here for example and this has to do with the topology because this edge here we have quads going here and then here and we have this long edge here it's going to try to conform to that positioning to that skewing so it might be a good idea to turn on constraints edge or face although in this case edge is the best one the better one and kind of even it out here like so and now you can turn on edge or face and just kind of even out your topology and but this is usually not necessary it's just that if you wanna have really clean topology you can do that alright so we have gone to insert a loop through here now we need to go ahead and insert loop through here you can do this through you can use the cut tool or you can go ahead and insert a loop through here use the slide to move over here okay for optimum subdivision for optimum results and we apply total smooth we need to go ahead and have the topology now the edge flow going around here so edge flow is as the name implies how the edges flow from one to the two them to the other and this right here is not ideal edge flow however all you have to do is just weld right here and remove these right here and now I have a much better edge flow and we can make this even sharper by inserting another loop through here and now it's even sharper okay and I also want to go ahead and insert a loop through here and now I have the sharpness that I would like here and to have a more rounded shape here I can go ahead and perhaps use set flow and that will analyze the surrounding geometry and attempt to take your selected sub objects and move in between them so right now it's analyzing the curve I have here and when I apply a set flow it's going to try to move this edge in between here like so it's a good it's a good way of getting some smooth organic shapes okay and I can go ahead and insert my loops back here so I can have a sharp edge here okay so you'll notice that I want to have sharpness here but I do not want to have sharpness here however when I enter loop through here to tighten up this edge it also tightens up this right here the way to eliminate that is I can go ahead and use set flow and it will go ahead and move so here the edges are further apart which creates smoothness and here the edges are close together which creates sharpness you can also manually move them apart using constraints a face and I can continue just kind of modifying things around until I get a result there's more to my liking so now I have a more smooth rounded geometry meeting with a lot sharper geometry now you can just go ahead and continue until you get better and just continue modeling so I like to also use the planar tools right here make planar will take your select geometry and analyze their normals so if I select these polygons and click on make planar it's going to go ahead analyze the normal the normals of all these normals are invisible arrows pointing outwards from every vertice so every vertex has invisible arrows pointing outwards let's go ahead and go under edit normals so we can see them in action and these blue lines right here are the normals and as you can see every vertex has normal is pointing out from them if I have this selected and click on an eggplant it will take the combined the averaged position of the normal so it's going to take all these normals and average them out and it's going to make it flat according to the average number which is this right here however if I use x y&z it will make the selection planar according to the XY and z axis so you can see right here these vertices this add these engines are not straight if I click on Y it will make them want planar to the y-axis so I use this quite frequently to even things out and clean up topology so what I'll do here is I'll just go ahead and delete that select this and I cute it out here to create this kind of detail and then go ahead and select this and weld all right and they can go ahead and just select this and continue actuating it outwards to create more geometry I can start rotating it to get a lot a lot more creative a lot more organic and there we go so this is a great technique for creating environmental environments and different kind of curved shapes you can also apply the similar modifier why to start giving yourself more ideas and just to start creating more geometry and just kind of experimenting with it with it the symmetry modifier along with the angle Snap is a great way to quickly take a simple piece of geometry and modify it in different ways to give yourself more variations so I can take that simple thing I made and continue evolving it growing it and exploring the possibilities so I can use the simple geometry to create an entire floor set and use an entire system of flooring and walls and ceilings and everything else to create a whole environment let me go ahead and delete that and put a new one on here let's try Y flip the y-axis and so I can just keep playing around with symmetry and getting a lot of different results here so the symmetry modifier is a great way of expanding what you already have and feeling your imagination and also kind of a shortcut to creating a lot of more detailed geometry so as you can see here I have taken this simple geometry and with three so much amount of fires I have gone and created this and of course they're all smooth so do not underestimate the power of simple modifiers so thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 104,545

Keywords: 3D Modeling (Film Job), Tutorial, review, free, online, education, learn, class, lesson, arrimus, 3D Computer Graphics Software (Software Genre), graphics, hard, surface, model, modeling, Computer Graphics (images) (Field Of Study), 3d, 3ds, cg, cgi, Computer Animation (Industry), max, Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), autodesk

Id: eFX4NNeoZtM

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 01 2014