Andrew Hodgson's Modeling Guidelines #1

hello in this video we'll be taking a look at some topology examples by andrew hodgson and pretty much pulling out lessons that i can show you guys so andrew hodgson has worked a number of big hollywood blockbusters we've got things like guarding to the galaxy terminator genesis the finest hours the hunger games independence day parts of the caribbean valerian transformer star wars solo avengers star wars terminator and much much more so now i have not seen any of these films but from what i have heard there are lots of explosions and lots of computer generated imagery and lots of 3d models so you can treat andrew hodgson as an authority on the proper modeling topology for these big films and if it's good enough for these big movies it should be good enough for your small film as well or your small project or maybe you do want to get a job in a large studio so here's what you need to follow you need to follow these guidelines you can find a link to this page in the description it'll be the first thing there and pretty much i'm going to go through all of these and we can take a look at what lessons we can learn what can we learn about proper topology for the highest level because remember if you just make something for you know for yourself there are no high level standards there but if you're making something for the largest movies out there they have very high standards so if you can reach that standard if you can reach that level that can teach you about all sorts of modeling tips and tricks with polygons here so let's get started so pretty much i've got all these images all nine and let's start with the last one because there's some interesting information here let's read this out the biggest difference between the concept and production mesh is how clean the production mesh is and how fast the concept mesh is so basically we need to get this out of the way first difference between a production and a concept mesh the concept mesh is all about speed you have a shape in your head you have an idea and you want to get into a form as quickly as possible that's the concept so what's prized here what's valued the concept is the speed with production it's how clean it is so if you have some quick idea you want to get out before it fades your mind you want to do the concept however if you're making something for a client for a film that can be seen on screen textured rendered and passed on to other people you want to use this production right here and this is just a screen grab from maya so this is not the final render this is just what we see in the viewport with concept the quality of the topology doesn't matter at all as long as you get the shapes you want this means you can just hack together and boolean shapes as you please most likely no one else will be picking it up after you and it's just for still renders so that's one thing to understand guys is that when you're working the studio you're not the only one working with these things there's going to be people taking this to the next level maybe unwrapping it texturing it rigging it applying very special effects damaging it destroying it and who knows what else so you need to give them a clean mesh to work with and a lot of times i see these questions in the comment section why do we need to make everything with quads with four sided polygons why not is just because we're just told to do so with no reason well there is a reason and andrew hodgson is going to explain why because it's going to get passed on and there's a certain standard when you're textured and you're subdividing it a sub d production mesh takes much much longer to make as you have to plan out ahead and work out the flow of the topology correctly as it will be subdivided at render time a few standard rules for fencing or triple edging a mesh is so i like to use the term support loops but he uses fencing or triple fencing triple edging so basically when you have a box this is fencing and this is triple fencing or triple edging because you now have three edges that are going to control the sharpness of this part right here when it's subdivided so moving them together makes it sharper move it apart makes it smoother so different people use different terms i like to use support loops but you can also use fencing or triple edging everything should be quads a few triangles are fine but try to make everything quads having everything in quads just make it easier to work with makes it easy to insert loops as well so let's say for example we have a triangle have a plane i want to give this a gray object color and edit poly and what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to insert a loop through here and i'm just going to target weld and i'm also going to target right here so we have a triangle so we can't get rid of the fact that it's a triangle but if we make it a quad somehow or make it into quads we can make it easier to work with so sometimes you can get away from the fact that the shape is a triangle because that's just the way it is but what i can do for example is let's say you want to add support loop so how do we do that if i use swift loop you can see nothing's really happening because it's not a quad so what we can do is just maybe select this and tessellate this and now notice we've turned that single triangle into four quads which means we can now easily loop it up and there we go so as you can see having these nice quads just makes it easier to add loops now another question you may have is why do we need these loops why do we need the fencing or triple edging why can't we just use edge creasing open subnet isn't that the hot new technology and as he explains well let's just keep reading and i will explain that reduce the amount of poles if you can too many edges flowing into a single point so we can see that as we look at the various objects basically you don't want to have too many edges coming out of a single vertex right here no end guns five or more standard polygons so pretty much just have all quads some triangles mostly quads absolutely no n-gons have an even spread of topology if the mesh is taken into z-brush and subdivided the mesh will get heavy quick and you don't want all that to polish to go into small areas as it may limit your ability to sculpt on the more bare parts so we can see that on the very basic box shape so if we do the triple fencing method which i'm going to use connect for that so i can just connect and then pinch all right we're going to get this so sometimes you want to take things into zbrush to subdivide so if you subdivide what's going to happen is that the edges get a lot more polygons to it and there will be less in the inside and if you subdivide it more there'll be a very heavy concentration right here that we may not necessarily need what you may want to do is just kind of damage these parts for example and you don't need all of this topology because it's going to slow down zbrush because the more polygons you have the more things will slow down in this case it'll be an unnecessary slowness because we want to have more polygons in the center so this is with three iterations let's make two iterations what we can do instead is to if we're going to subdivide this we can have more segments right here and so now with two subdivisions notice how both of these have two subdivisions but this one has a lot more polygons for us to sculpt on on the second level right here as opposed to this one which needs to go to four subdivision levels to reach the same amount of density as this one has support edges when the mesh is smooth the edges will move so you need to have supporting edges to help preserve the uvs from spreading too much so that goes back towards saying previously is that why not just use edge creasing so if i just delete both of these so you may wonder why can't i just you know subdivide why can't i just crease this and just rely on subdivision here well it's because because when you work with textures the texture get warped by not having the loops here it's going to cause a lot more texture distortion so if you insert those loops it helps to protect the uvs and textures from distorting too much at render time so unfortunately for this high quality film production you pretty much have to rely on support loops triple edging and fencing because using creases using open subject has limited use because it just does not do a good job of preserving the uvs and preserving the textures so as you notice all of his professional meshes here have support loops and they don't rely on open sub-level edge creasing however you can still use that as you're making things so for example if i got a plane right here you can still use it in the modeling phase just the final mesh has to be support looped so for example what i can do is just apply open subdiv here and i can select this so here's the thing when we're modeling we want things to be as sharp as possible that just makes it easier if we use support loops here let's say for example we want to add small details here well we can't do it right now i have to set about it so if we rely on support loops for that process during the modeling phase right if we have this what's going to happen is after open subdiv we are going to have our additional polygons which allows us to make smaller details but now it's lost its perfect sharpness here which is just going to make things that much more difficult however if we use during the modeling phase let's say for example i will select this and remove it hold down control click on remove to remove the vertices as well during the modeling phase i can just give this a perfect sharpness open sub-div at a poly and it's going to subdivide it but it's going to have things still be perfectly sharp which will just make modeling that much easier for example i can do is just bevel this with zero play on the z-axis snap it right here weld and there we go and we don't have to worry about the unnecessary complications caused by this being smooth right here which just makes things more complicated during the modeling phase remember we want to get rid of triangles so we're going to select this and remove there we go once again ctrl a perfect sharpness open subdiv add a poly and now we can make even smaller details here there we go so whenever you want some more details you have to subdivide because a simpler mesh will not support those details so you can just keep doing this and just keep getting smaller and smaller details okay so getting back to reducing the amount of poles this is a situation that has a lot of publications for cylinders so if you create a default cylinder here in 3ds max on the programs you will get this however some programs like blender for example have special additional add-ons which give you for example a quad cylinder but it can also be done easily in 3ds max as well so for example if you increase the cap segments you'll notice how we get poles we get this vertex right here with pretty much 16 edges connected to it what i like to do is to just let's say convert this to edible poly and what i can do is just delete these vertices all right what i'm going to do is just go into border select this border using a free collection of scripts called rapid tools topology rapid quad cap which is going to get this right here you can use this in border level or you can use this in vertex level and that will get more finer control over it for example just like these two vertices and now i get this right here same for the bottom i have a video about shape dependent topology and shape independent biology as well which goes well with this topic of cylinders let's go back to one of his first points about the difference between a production mesh and a concept mesh so pretty much the concept the speed matter so if i'm listening very quickly here we got a box and if i was modeling this for production what i would do is maybe i would just test later first and if i want this to be a curve for example i can select this and create the curve that i want just by moving this right so now what i can do is just kind of create this kind of curve by doing this for example and now it's nice and clean i may still have to have the proper topology going around here which i can do by selecting this and in setting there we go and once again our triple edging fencing method will give us this right here and so this is a production mesh another vision mesh however if i was doing this for constant for example what i can do is just rely on chamfer or bevel in blender if you're using blender and if using blend you can still follow along with this because a lot of concepts are the same so what i would do is just chamfer this and have a huge amount of segments here and this would be the difference between a production mesh on the left and a concept mesh on the right for example and we can just quickly boolean things as well with a high value even so there we go concept just test things out sometimes you just have this shape in your head and you want to get into a form into this 3d model form as quickly as you can it's almost like if an artist is in restaurant they have this amazing image pop into their mind to quickly take out a napkin with a basic pen and you scribble something on there just to get that shape down then you can go home and refine it and create into a full full film production ready sketch or mesh this was part one we got a lot of the basic contents out of the way in the next part we'll actually start going over these various images thank you for watching and take care you

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 39,750

Keywords: tutorial, walkthrough, arrimus, andrew hodgson, model, modeling, topology, guide, 3d, 3ds, max, design, detail, movie, film, star wars, beginner, quick, fast, easy, simple, how to, maya

Id: dlMzoNX3uCU

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020