Become a Topology PRO with these Five Tips

since I made my last video about topology tips in blender I've had a bunch of requests to make some sort of follow-up and I did promise a few months back that this would be a series so luckily I have quite a lot of these tips up my sleeve so let's take a look at some of the methods professionals use to handle their topology when 3D modeling so at the end of my last topology video I showed off a method to create a cylinder that has all quads and no end guns on the cap a lot of people said they found that really useful and there's actually a few methods of doing this with various strengths and weaknesses so I thought I would show off a few of the methods that I commonly use so the first method is essentially the same as the one I demoed in the last video you just delete the top of a cylinder and then you select the top Edge Loop you press e to extrude and S do scale it in a little bit and then if you press Ctrl f with the inner ring selected you can perform a grid fill operation you can straighten this out a little bit if it's wonky by playing with the offset number and I tend to find that you get slightly better distribution of faces if you enable symbol blending in object mode if I press Ctrl and a number like 4 that'll add a subdivision surface modifier and I can add some support loops and as you can see we get some nice shading and good chord topology we can also easily change how sharp the edge of the cylinder is just by grabbing these Edge loops and double tapping G and then sliding them closer or further away from the edge the next method requires you to have a cylinder that has a triangle fan there is an option for that when you make the cylinder or if you've already got the cylinder in the scene you can select the top inset a little bit press M and collapse and you'll get a triangle fan so if we select the top and we inset again then we just need to go around and manually select every other one of these edges that make up the triangles unfortunately check a deselect and things like that won't work here so you do have to do it manually but it doesn't take very long once you've got that done you can press Ctrl and delete which will dissolve those edges and now the triangles are actually all quads so we can add in a support Loop to this because it if you look if we have the uh sort of vision surface you can see it goes a bit wobbly but if we add support Loops in we get a nice smooth top on the cylinder so for this final method we're just going to need a plan cylinder I'm going to go into top view with number part seven I'm going to select the top and bottom most vert and I'm going to press J to join them then we're going to do that one vertex either side I'm going to do 11 horizontal Cuts so I'm starting with the middle row and I'm doing 5 above and then I'm going to go down and select the ones underneath and I'm going to do the Five Below if you don't connect the last one together then what you'll notice is that that face is actually a quad with four sides on the edges so now like before we can just add in our supporting Loop we can select all of the faces on the top and do an inset with the I key to add a supporting Looper on the top as well and if we add a subdivision surface modifier we get another nice smooth result now I don't use this one very often but it can be handy when you need to transition from a cylinder to a square shape or if you're using the subdivision surface modifier like this you can make these nice inset shapes which sometimes comes in handy okay so this mesh has Edge Loops that go horizontal and it has vertical ones but what if we wanted to change the direction of a loop so it goes something like this around the corner well that's actually quite easy to do all we need to do is select the two edges that we want to become our redirection Point press M and collapse in theory we have just done exactly what we set out to achieve we've redirected a loop to go around the corner you can see that we still have Edge Loops that go horizontal and we have vertical ones but we now have an edge Loop which turns the corner however this looks really bad and it's messy topology so I'm just going to use the snapping tools to align this with the other verts around it to move it into a bit of a better position you can see that we've created two triangles here as well all I'm going to do here is just select these two Edge loops and press Ctrl and delete and just dissolve them entirely now we have the really nice clean topology that we were looking for and we still have that redirected Edge loop with one going horizontal one vertical and one around the corner if we apply a subdivision surface modifier to this you can see that we get some pretty decent looking topology and it's a nice smooth curve the next thing I want to talk about is dealing with poles pole is a vertex connected to multiple edges there's two types of poles to be concerned about in 3D modeling there's end poles which have three edges and a poles which are connected to five edges poles with six or more connecting edges are usually considered bad topology and should just be avoided entirely where possible e-polls the ones which have five edges are most commonly created when you extrude a face out and end poles the ones with three edges are most often found on Sharp corners now poles aren't necessarily bad and often they're actually unavoidable however you do need to manage them properly to make sure that they don't cause shading issues and other mesh artifacts generally speaking you should avoid placing either type of pole on a curve with a steep gradient try to move the pole away to a flatter area of the mesh instead for example here is a mesh with an apoll right on the corner and you can see once we apply the subdivision surface modifier it causes this weird pinching effect now here's the same mesh only I've moved the pole so that it's further back from the curve and now on a flat surface which completely eliminates all the problems before we move on I want to take a minute to talk about the sponsors of this video is Zeus and Intel they've sent me this it's a Asus Pro Art Studio book 16 OLED laptop and this thing is a real Beast for Creative work it comes with a powerful Intel Core I9 3980 HX processor an RTX 4070 graphics card 8 terabytes of storage and 64 gigabytes of RAM it's powered by a 13th gen Intel Core I9 processor and the 16 inch Asus Lumina OLED display looks absolutely gorgeous it's 3.2 K resolution touch compatible and the laptop comes with a stylus in the box which is really handy for 3D work another great feature specifically for 3D artists is the inclusion of a dial for precision control when adjusting parameters like colors and brush sizes the Asus style has a lot of useful applications that can be adjusted in the Asus Pro art Creator Hub app this is an application that makes it really easy to calibrate and customize your device as well as monitoring its performance I'll be spending the next few weeks putting this laptop through its Paces with a really ambitious project so keep an eye out for that video you'll find a link in the description where you can find out more about this Asus laptop and the Intel processor that powers it also you might want to check out the Asus Pro artist awards for 2023 it's currently open for submissions it's always a fantastic competition and the total prizes this year are worth more than a hundred thousand dollars topology of the human face is one of the more Dawning exercises in 3D modeling it's very complex shape to begin with and you need to think about how the mesh will deform when it's animated and you also want to avoid any weight shading artifacts over the years 3D modelers have devised a fairly standardized method of face topology so one Edge Loop should go around the eyes another loop goes around the mouth a wider Loop goes around the chin and across the bridge of the nose and then there's a fourth Loop that usually surrounds the ears and it's just a case of expanding these loops and joining them together you'll notice where the loops do join it creates e-polls this method puts the e-polt in the least problematic areas they're inevitable but if you use this Loop Arrangement it shouldn't cause any issues this final tip is a really quick one when you're making a deformable joint on a character such as an elbow a knee or a finger knuckle it's important to have a edge Loop which runs around the circumference of the top of the joint you can see that here on this human generator model it's actually very easy to do you just need to select the top eight or so faces that surround the top of the joint and press I to inset and that'll create the edge Loop for you this way you don't get any weird artifacts from stretching and deforming in the mesh thanks for watching this video and thanks to Asus and Intel for sponsoring it make sure you check out the link in the description to read more about the pro art 6 day laptop

Channel: DECODED

Views: 247,442

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, vfx artist, topology guide, topology tips, blender topology

Id: AZsmakJi1WY

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023