Blender Boolean Cleanup: Topology Study #1

okay so this video is going to discuss how to properly clean up topology and issues after using a boolean modifier basically giving you this terrible terrible shading and topology here if we take a look and I'm gonna show you how to go from this over to this okay so I'm gonna add in a cylinder here and keep in mind mine is on sixty-four vertices I just think that gives us a nice smooth set of edges on here then I'm gonna go into hops and Q I sharpen this and now everything is smooth out that basically just applies Auto smooth and smooth shading and I believe in hops it does 60 you can change it to 30 whatever so yeah we have the cylinder now I'm gonna rotate it 90 degrees and we'll just hop in here and lay it out the bottom half like that and then we can go ahead and scale up actually what we'll do is we'll scale on the Y a little bit go back here and then scale this area on the X just a tad bit nothing crazy that looks good to me and then we'll just go ahead and fill everything in make this guy manifold fill that fill that and then fill the bottom here so at this point we're gonna get into the core of the video and that's actually doing the boolean cut now you can kind of see the shadings quite stretched here because they don't have any evenness going in this direction with loops so I mean you could go in here and add in loops to kind of make that shady nicer but we don't want to do that from the get-go because once we add in our boolean cut it's not gonna have those loops extending over where that cut is so that's gonna be no good here's a quick example of what I mean you can see once I applied a boolean cut here we don't have these loops extending through here which is not what we're going for basically let's we'll wait to add in any sort of loop cuts let me undo all this whoops wait to add in any loop cuts here you'll see why so we're just gonna go ahead and do our boolean cut now I'm gonna add in another cylinder rotate this guy and maybe we'll go into side view cue sharpen that guy and then let's just you know rotate get this cut roughly where we want it to be make sure it's the size you want it so maybe what we could even do is go into viewport display and change this to a a wire view I just kind of see how that's gonna look and scale it up more you can kind of see where those intersection lines are and how the cutout is going to look I think this is perfect so I'm gonna shift select this guy ctrl - for that boolean cut and then we can make any final adjustments we'd like to make so maybe pull this down a bit and we'll hide the cutter and let's go ahead and just go in here and apply the boolean modifier and get to clean up okay you're gonna see we have this cut here now I'm gonna go ahead and go into Hopps and dice the sky and go in here this basically allows us to add in loops straight through object mode one of my favorite features so I'm just gonna add in a decent amount we don't need anything crazy really we want these to roughly be square not rectangle I'm just gonna make everything more even let's try this one more time increase a few more so yeah now we have a pretty dense amount of geometry which is gonna really allow us when to clean this thing up really allow us to clean everything in an easy manner because if we go in here and look you can see all these near-miss verts right if we didn't add in these loops going through here like there's really no area to clean anything up like we're gonna just start sliding these guys and it's just gonna stretch everything the shading is gonna be all skewed there's there's simply not enough geometry in this example right here to allow us to clean up the shading in any decent manner so yeah we want to keep everything as consistent and score as possible which is precisely why we're gonna use dicing here to just make the geo a little bit more dense in the other direction as well okay so some people like to straight up go in here and just add in a bevel that way they can immediately see where the problems are coming in you can see this is not looking good at all but before I add a bevel I don't even think it's worth testing it I simply go in here and start fixing up all of the near-miss vertices and then when I think everything's fairly clean then I test it with a bevel so it really saddens me people get panicked over these boolean cuts and cleaning the point of this video is going to be to ease your nerves on this it's a really simple process so what we need to do is start merging the near-miss verts together right now if we try to do it with a double tap eg going to see that the vertices do not merge so you have to go up here and make sure you have Auto merge turned on let's start sliding and slide this guy up here beside this guy over here now there's not really a right or wrong in terms of where you're merging these verts you just need to be smart with it for example I'm gonna slide this guy here and not the other way around if I slide this guy here it distorts the curvature that's no good so when you're slotting verts don't be careless actually think about what you're doing but most of the time it's some pretty mindless work in my opinion so we'll go in here for some reason my auto words turned off so make sure that doesn't happen to you slide that in slide this guy in we could probably terminate there we can always change things up later we probably will anyways now let's slide this up here maybe slide this down here actually I'll do this I think that'll be fine for now don't really stress too much about the intricacies because later on down the line you can fix this stuff pretty easily we're just trying to get the close vertices to kind of remove themselves or else it's gonna cause us artifacts somebody try to bevel so this guy's you know this guy's probably fine but I'm just gonna terminate it there you can always switch it up later if we want I have a feeling this bevel is gonna overlap at this one just let me slide that now it does distort the curvature a little bit here you can kind of see this face is gonna be inconsistent but it's such a minor change I don't think it's gonna be a big deal at all so I'm just gonna go ahead and go ahead and do that so this guy's kind of close merge that or do this guy up here might be a little bit tricky let's leave it for now and then I'm lazy I don't want to do the same thing to the other side so I'm gonna go into object mode alt X and Hopps change this to symmetrize over the x-axis here Senayan kind of see it has flipped it it's done the identical things we just did over here on this side and if I were to undo it take a look at this side look at the shading a lot cleaner once you started merging I also like to go in matte cap just because the shadings a little bit cleaner to me that looks good okay so at this point let's go ahead and drop on a bevel then we can really see where the issues are coming from so Q and then bevel I'll press end to heart in the normals and just bevel this okay so already we can see artefacts up in that corner we can see the bevels really fat right here so let's go in here and take a look looks like but you don't have a connection for actually maybe we do yeah we do we might just need to even this out a little bit so let's take a look that could have simply been a result of that vertex we merged so what I'm actually gonna do is just select these two join them with J let's fill this in to make a quad to turn the bevel ons okay so a lot more even now you have a few artifacts here so we can take a look at how to fix those you can see on the shading kind of where the bevel terminates which is roughly right about here where the shading kind of gets flatter so with this vertex we can just select it and slide it just a tad bit we're not going too extreme so it doesn't matter as long as it's a little bit of a change we should be fine slide that guy you can see now we have a pretty even bevel here no real issues we are gonna have to check the shading to make sure there's no warping but we'll do that later for now this thing looks really really clean let's go up here and take a look at this this is where the real issues are now sometimes it's hard to see the Geo when the bevels on so feel free to turn it off with this little computer monitor button turn that off what I'm gonna do here is slide this vert up there let's see if that helps not too much let's let him do it see what else we could do maybe we could slide this one here and then this one here let's see how bad that distorted things not really I don't think it's a huge issue now if it does really start kind of changing the overall curvature I wouldn't recommend doing operations like this I'd recommend finding a different solution but in this case look at how close the Geo is it's if you look at the curvature here when I merge this it barely changes I don't think it's gonna really be noticeable to anyone I think it's fine so I'm gonna leave it like that and of course we can just symmetrize over here to keep everything clean so alt X and symmetry right here the shadings a little bit skewed and go in here and take a look as well now this is kind of caused by these two triangles meeting at their terminating point I do not like how that's looking so what I'm actually gonna do is join this area fill that to a quad and still not too well so we have cleaned up most of the geo here there's not really too many artifacts or shading issues but what I would like to do to kind of deal with these triangles terminating and you know occasionally probably an end gone here and there like in this area I'm just gonna go ahead and use a mesh machine and offset this area and then clean up that way this is just a trick I use all the time when I'm doing this so I'm just going to control click across here all the way around like that and then if we press Y will go into mesh machine offset this guy scroll up so it's in the other direction and I'm gonna offset it just to about here if you look at the vertices up here in the top I kind of want them to overlap just about so that'll be a good merge point so right about there should be okay and then this is probably gonna make you panic don't worry it's very easy to clean up first of all what we're gonna do is go to this offset and just actually start sliding these points into each other to clean up the back area you can also control click some of them slide this guy and then mm let's see what we can do with this one this one looks a little bit tricky I'm actually gonna stick with this side so we can just symmetrize everything so yeah this one looks a little bit tricky I'm gonna join these vertices here slide this one so now we have a quad in this area slide this guy and if you can't slide it you might have to just go into vertex snap snap it that way just turn off the bevel we'll go ahead and slide this guy and just start cleaning up this really bad offset like I said the offset looked like it was going crazy and it was but it really just comes down to moving a few vertices here and there that's why sometimes it's just easier to turn off the bevel because it makes people less scared including myself honestly now I'm gonna avoid skewing the offset edges if I were to move this one you can kind of see the offset edge here is uneven compared to these so instead I'm just gonna focus on moving these vertices around it instead so let's turn that bevel back off slide this guy slide this guy this one here and then this one which one this one here we'll slide this one and then just to kind of even up this offset a little bit we'll move that up so look at this and now we kind of have a loop cut going almost all the way around this bevel which is pretty much what we want to make everything nice and clean now I do want to keep everything as even as possible so right here is gonna get a little bit tricky generally if you can get a loop going all the way around cleanly which is what we're trying to do then you're pretty much good to go but look at this it terminates right at the triangle we kind of wanted to continue through so we need to make this a quad redirecting in this direction here so let's just do a little bit of critical thinking as to how we could approach this solution so one thing I want to mention you're more than welcome to add loops to help you reroute and connect things up as long as these loops do not distort your geometry and they're not gonna cause you issues in general let me show you something sometimes you might need to add loops or you think you will in a sort of curve service like this but watch what happens if I start adding loops this way look what it does it kind of gives you bad shame and this is not a true curved surface anymore this is kind of curved and then flat flat flat flat curved again it's not consistent enough to call it a curved surface but if we add loops in this direction for example it's not distorting the curvature at all if we go into object mode look absolutely no issues with the shading here is zero you don't see anything because this is following the flow of the curves now we're not gonna actually be using this for anything I just wanted to mention it now you're more than welcome to adding curves as long as it doesn't distort the actual shading and curvature okay the reason I mention this is because the first thing I would be thinking of in this type of situation keep in mind we're trying to make this a loop continue on around here but it's stopping up a triangle so at first glance I might think okay well it's completely fine to add in a edge loop this way because it's not distorting the curvature and then you know I try connecting this up and making this a quad you know something like this is probably what I'd go for issue here is it's not gonna flow along this area it's just gonna flow straight through so this is actually not the solution or going for so let me undo this so we need to think of a different approach and I'm actually gonna do is take this vertex slide it down a bit I don't want to slide it down too far otherwise the curvature is gonna kind of be not as consistent you can get away with a little bit just not too much so maybe pull it down here and then for this guy we could probably pull it up here and then you can kind of see how much it kind of works out the bevel so let's even this out we'll move it around here so it's even looks good to me and now check this out look look which way this curvature is flowing all the way through now let's go in here and even this guy up because look at this huge quad I mean it's probably okay in terms of shading probably won't notice too much but it's still a pretty big difference in curvature because you can see how even the curves are going with these phases then we just have a stretch which is going to kind of ruin the curvature here so what I'm gonna do is clean that up I'm gonna take this vertex shift selected this one and then J to join and then we can go ahead and fill in these two tries to make it a quad and then if you want you can slide this maybe a little bit more consistent don't really have to but it's probably good just for good measure and this triangle here is completely fine this is a planar surface the bevel is not gonna really affect anything honestly if you turn this on take a look I don't see any real issues here now I like to call these areas dead areas in the sense that I can have the most terrible geometry in these types of areas but it doesn't matter because it doesn't affect the shading but in turn it helps me clean up other areas where the shading will actually go bad and that's precisely what I did here I just added in an edge that doesn't have any sort of effect on the shading you can see that here no problem with it but this edge right here allowed me to clean up the curvature by simply moving this a little bit closer so it wasn't as a warped in this direction so yeah feel free to use dead areas to your advantage you don't have to worry too much about the Geo if I just connect up vertices here and just go crazy with it I mean this looks absolutely horrible look at this this view is terrible but if we go into object mode and turn on the bevel we don't care we don't see any sort of shading issues it simply doesn't matter so yeah these planar surfaces are super beneficial to us in many many situations just because the shade is quite always flawless and you can use it to your advantage so yeah hopefully you see what I mean now by using this dead area to your advantage so now we have pretty even curvature here maybe pull that up a little bit yeah the curvature is super super even I don't really see any shading issues here let's turn on the bevel take a look again everything looks really clean to me now over here we didn't clean up but we're not going to we're just going to alt X and then symmetrize to the other side so look at this this geo is already looking a lot cleaner and here's the number one mistake people make and it makes me sad because you do all this geo cleanup work and everything but you don't finish the job and the second job is shading shading is so important and the shading looks good on the surface right I mean this thing looks pretty decent but the only way to really tell how bad the shading is is to use a matte cap so I'm going to go in here to the matte cap and I like to use this reflective one this really starts to pick up areas where there's a bad shade if we just kind of hit it at certain angles you can see if you look at the bright light it starts warping and the goal here to fix the shading is to stop the warping so always always always use a reflective matte cap like this and you'll pretty much see exactly where your shading issues are so in my experience with hard surface tiny triangles kind of like this tend to give more bad shading results than bigger triangles just my experience maybe someone has a better solution or explanation usually what I do with these types of situations is I simply take these vertices and merge them and just produce a bigger triangle and the shadings always a little bit cleaner I'd say if I undo this and redo you can see what's happening you can already see the shadings a little bit more consistent here and if we go into object mode after I mean if there is shading issues it's so incredibly minor that it's simply I don't see any and if there is I don't think it's it's a parent enough to even worry about but if you go in here you're gonna see look at that there's a pretty clear defined little stretch mark so yeah my experience I found that sliding the smaller triangles and producing bigger ones gives you cleaner shading I don't know how well you can see this on the YouTube resolution but there is definitely a much better difference in making a bigger triangle here you do want to be careful however because if you start merging bigger and bigger triangles you're gonna completely distort the curvature here look at that this area is gonna be a lot more flatter at these phases in these phases so you don't want to go too far because if you really started to sort the curvature it's gonna be noticeable minor changes are fine but big ones are no good let me slide this a little bit probably too far up that's decent okay we're gonna go to these other triangles and slide them in just make a little bit of bigger triangles there I think that'll be okay now at this point all you really need to do is take the matte cap look at it from an angle like this and just look at the light and see if the light produces any distortions you you get bad distortions then there's a pretty clear signal there's a shading issue if it's pretty much flat and consistent the whole time you're good so what I like to do it just slowly pull through here and very very minor distortions are completely fine that's probably gonna happen around the triangles anyways but you're looking for big distortions big changes so we're gonna keep going through this is pretty consistent the whole time just keep going up go through here might be a little bit of warping in this corner let's take a look it's not too bad what I'm gonna do though is just slide things around here just make it a little bit more confined it doesn't matter too much I still think it's pretty clean yeah that looks pretty good to me and by the way the bevels are always gonna have somewhat weird shading just because of how they are unless you have a super dense amount of bevel segments or you have a subsurf on so if you're just doing generic hard surface this is fine because it's capturing their reflection like it needs to so yeah I run the bevels that don't stress too much about it it was good to me what I'm gonna do though is symmetrize alt X and then symmetry now I'm sealing the inside here and because I have a suspicion we're gonna hit some warping on the inside area so same drill use the light to your advantage pan through here and look for any severe signs of warping you might not have any which will be good we can always cross our fingers and hope for that but inside you actually looking pretty good to me I'm happy with the result there and there wasn't really any sort of weird warping we could even look at a steep angle maybe on this side just look at a steep angle see if we can see anything at all maybe we could go in and try a different matte cap a shinier one maybe and just look at a steep angle I don't see any shading errors here if you do it's probably this matte cap here because the matte cap has this like glare going out so don't confuse it to go to this side so yeah this thing is actually looking pretty decent I think we did quite well with this inside as you can see the curvature on the inside is super super consistent up until you know around these triangles but these triangles are not really causing any issues at all the outside we can look at the Geo outside geo looks pretty clean as well we do have these triangle connections which is not always the most fun so one thing I want to mention about reflective mat caps and if anyone in the comment section wants to have a civil debate about this we're more than welcome this is gonna help everyone as an artist with the reflective mat caps they're meant to bring out even the deepest deepest shading errors if I were to go at some sort of angle I'm sure at some point these triangles are gonna capture a shading issue it's gonna be so incredibly minor though I'm gonna really try to look and find one if I go to a certain angle it's super hard to even see okay I see a little bit of a shading error error here in the YouTube resolution you probably won't even see it there is a super tiny shading error here from this triangle now you need to keep in mind that we're using a reflective matte cap which is really meant to bring out even the tiniest of tiniest shading errors in your mesh so when you're using a reflective matte cap and you see a super minor shading issue it doesn't matter because that's what it's meant to do when you go into a generic render or a more solid matte cap you're never in a million years gonna ever be able to detect that minor shading error that the reflective ones capture so I want to ease everyone's nerves a little bit in the fact that when you see a super super tiny shading error that's never gonna be noticeable in a render or anything don't waste your time this thing is good look at this I'm gonna even go into the normal matte cap we clean this thing up and I see zero issues now this is basically as good as the render is gonna get in terms of shading and there's no issues we cleaned up all the big ones so don't stress about it if we go in here and look at the geometry look at how cleanly NIT and tight this geo is the only areas were really gonna have any issues are around these triangles and like I said they're just simply not notice of they're not you're never gonna see him in a render so here's our final result guys I want people to stop stressing out so much about just the perfect perfect quad Geo and this and that it it's all about shading especially if you're doing concept renders it's it's a topic that is so overly hyped that it damages people as artists do what you need to do to clean the shading and anything else you need to do that's secondary clean the shading first the shading is good look at this we have nice geo some triangles here and there I don't even think we have any end Gaughan's actually this thing just looks good I mean we do have these n-gons here but they're planar planar surfaces so they don't matter but yeah that's about it for this video I really hope this helped you guys out in some way or another and can it gave you more of an idea of how to clean up a boolean cuts in this manner if this helped you guys out you can definitely go follow me on Instagram or Twitter links in the description and you can see a lot of my artworks most of which I promise you do not have perfect quad topology so you can kind of get more reassurance there as well anyways guys I'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 71,562

Rating: 4.9299693 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, boolean, cleanup, shading, topology, issues, tutorial, fix, clean, geometry, bevel, subsurf, subdivision, surface, hard, modeling, loops, quads

Id: -CmqP1KPuns

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020