Blender - Topology Fundamentals

hey guys so someone asked if I go over the topology fundamentals and so that's what we're going to do in this video now I'm not going to completely exhaust the topic I'm going to go over some Basics here a little classroom session then we'll move over to blender play around some things so let's just get started top left here I dot in 3D space it can be known as a Vertex I think we're all aware of that if you connect two vertices together you'll end up with an edge smallest face you can make is a triangle it's going to be three edges three verts with a single face next up is the quad four edges four verts single face sometimes they look like diamonds but they can also look like a triangle and they'll have an extra vertex on one of the edges and that's going to behave just like any other quad so except it does that extra vertex usually does create a pole there it's going to create What's called the end pull we'll get to that in a second so the in-gon is going to be a single face with five or more edges and vertices up to an infinite amount these present themselves in all kinds of different ways they could look like circles triangles squares any other shape you can make it look like a dolphin okay now an inpole is a vertex that has three edges coming out of it this one's extremely important to understand when you're getting into modeling because you're going to see this repeat a lot across your models and you need to understand it we're going to play around with in 3D so we'll get over there I'll explain it more uh the e-pol on the other hand is going to be a Vertex with five edges or more up to an infinite amount coming out of a single vertex right so mesh resolution density kind of the same thing you could think of like a plane that's subdivided once that's low resolution low density if you subdivided multiple times you'll end up with a higher density mesh your model itself can have fluctuating densities throughout the model it's better if you try to balance these things but it's not always going to be possible in some situations you actually don't want to do that when it comes to like optimizing models for games and things like that so all mesh at the end of the day are all faces at the end of the day except for a triangle will be triangulated underneath everything you won't see the lines drawn so but if you have a face an in God or a quad you pull up one corner you will actually see the triangulation take effect on that face we're going to talk about that one more as well now when you have edges usually they naturally kind of have a flow to them and if you take that edge flow and you wrap around your model it'll end up creating a loop basically so edges Edge flows are like the best way you can control your mesh generally speaking when you're working with 3D models so we're going to play around with all of this but we got to go to blender to do it so this scene here all we're going to be doing is kind of breaking down a few things some of the stuff I just talked about let's start with the plane first if we lift up a corner you'll see it actually is triangulated and that's why we get this little crease here and so if it's flat it's called a plantar face if it's not flat where you do something like that that is going to be called a non-player phase now let's go ahead and lift this one up a little bit real quick and what we'll see here is that by default in blender all faces are rendered double-sided so it'll have what looks like another face under here right or the backside to it anyways that's not how usually game engines display things so if you turn on backface calling you'll see it actually becomes transparent I only recommend getting used to this idea because if you ever run into this problem in a game engine you'll be able to uh recognize this a little easier than if you're using other ways of checking if a face is forward or backwards but you can't check it in other ways so if you turn that off and you are in edit mode you'll see here that in this drop down there's something called face orientation okay and so you can see what it's doing it's Drawn Faces that are forward blue but if they are backwards they're red okay so you can also do that if you wanted to that's going to be up to you I prefer just going with back face colon now here in blender if you're working with a quad you can actually switch that triangulation by hit Ctrl F doing face data selecting the face control that face data flip quad tessellation you can actually set it up something like this if you wanted to a little hard to see it but basically the edge is now running down this way so that's something to keep in mind as well and of course faces do have what's called a normal you're in edit mode you can turn on the face normal here and make it bigger if needed and so it does have a direction to it so when you hit alt in and you slip it that's going to reverse it basically right so that's what's going on there now you don't just have normals on faces you have normals on vertices as well I'm gonna flip that back so when you're working on a mesh and you extrude another piece out here it always has this normal data for every face so here's the trick about this you can actually use this to control your transforms so you can use normal up here so if you're using like the move tool you'll see it actually goes up and down on that normal so normally when you do like an extrude it goes out on that little blue line that's what it's actually doing it's following the normal there so when you select two faces and you extrude it goes on the combined normal between the two if you ever don't want that behavior you can switch to an active element you can shift double click on something and you'll use that one instead even if you have both of them selected okay so that's just a good piece of transform information there that might help you out when you're modeling all right let me uh delete that let's turn off the normals all right so let's go ahead and check out the end pull and the e-poll real quick so if you had a triangle or a five-sided n-gon and you subdivide these one times they're going to actually create the end pole here I'm going to create the e-poll here and these are surrounded by quads so just pay attention to that as well there's three quads here and there's gonna be five on this particular shape right now when you subdivide them more the end pole is going to start to create kind of a pinching effect here okay as you subdivide it up this is just something worth noting that it's going to get denser in that little area right where the pole exists so if we zoom out you can see what's actually going on there so the mesh density Rises a little bit in those areas and on the e-pole it's going to stretch apart a little bit so it actually isn't as dense in that area and a lot of times the poles are used for redirects of your topology so you can actually see how the topology is Flowing here these edges The Edge flow and the end pole is doing something like that whereas the e-pole is a little bit more interesting because what this one does is it sends Edge flows out in all kinds of different directions so it's actually really useful when you're trying to run different Edge flows into each other but you want to just kind of redirect them back out in different ways now truthfully you're more than likely not going to intentionally try to create epoles it's just usually not how it goes however the uh the end pull you will want to utilize in a lot of situations and pay particular attention to it you will be creating that one for sure because it's more useful for redirects in most cases than the uh the e-pol actually is now something that's interesting about the input on the e-pole is that it acts or behaves very similar to the triangle and any gun obviously they're created from it but when you have triangles and guns e-polls impulse you usually want to try to keep these on flat surfaces or plantar surfaces if possible so when you're doing hard surface modeling specifically if you can bring these around or you can push these e-poles and impulse or you can make your triangles or end-ons on the flat surfaces that will actually render just fine if it's on a flat surface even if you have a really crazy e-pole with like Bunches of edges coming out of it you won't have as many issues with it because it's on that flat surface so so let's go ahead and dive into the end pull a little bit further and we'll take this plane and we'll borrow it real quick and just kind of send it up here so we'll put it down here anyways we'll make a duplicate because we're going to do this a couple times so we've seen this topology before the the end pull with the three quads when you create a cube it actually exists right here on a cube there's your three quads here's your endpole you've never noticed that before it gets better than this of course if you take a cube and you chamfer it like this you see you get the little triangles okay so we know what a triangle is going to do if we subdivide it so if we subdivide this we hit Ctrl 2 shade is smooth what we'll see is that we turn off optimal display it actually does create a subdivided triangle just like so and so we have the end pole with the three quads there as well and so this is pretty much what you'll see in a lot of tutorials where guys are adding Loop cuts into the corners here to hold a subdivision model that's the three quads there's your impulse also a regular bevel right if you took the whole shape and you beveled it you get the three quads with the end bolt just wanted to point that one out for you it's kind of common you'll see this shape take place in a lot of different areas so even if you had done an inset on a face right so you press I on the inset cut this in half you'll start to notice something kind of familiar here press Y and rip it move it out real quick okay this is in fact an end pull with three quads so even your inset is the same deal now this is where it gets fun because when you have a plane and we're going to put a grid out on it we're going to subdivide it a few times and we're probably going to use that twice as well so we can start to see that these have kind of a flow to them where they're going through the shape here okay and that's happening on all these that same kind of thing going on right this is going to be your redirect slash Edge flow so when you have plane like this it's subdivided these are your edges these are their flows right it's pretty simple however if you use a knife tool you can cut out and you can even press X Y or Z if you need to or you can hit a or you can actually do hit a twice and you'll line up to oh I guess it doesn't work on the same example oh my God you hit a though and line up on angle as well but this usually lines up between two faces if you hit a twice unfortunately it doesn't work if you go across that so we'll have to hit Y in this case now if we hit X we can go this way okay look what we have going on here now if we press k and cut there to there we've created three quads the end pole all right so we can actually now do a loop cut because these are parallel lines with quads basically right here this this line and this line let's see they're parallel they have the same amount of vertices so we can hit Ctrl R and we can Loop cut through that if needed so we're able to control our Edge flows so we can actually send this all around the model and I'm going to do an inset hole control and hit B so that we get rid of that little border down there okay so we could do this all around our models and kind of direct the topology around on it at least Edge flow on the topology right so in reality topology is just the relationship between the the different edges of vertices and whatnot and that's all really is it's kind of arbitrary in nature where you can have good topology you can have bad topology but if something works it works at the same time so when you're doing like meshes that you want to bake High poly to low poly it doesn't really matter if it's a perfectly clean quad mesh if it's not deforming you're just baking it like you could use triangles in guns and it can be relatively messy and you can have quite amazing amazingly bad topology and still use it but you can see we can't control that edge flow which is nice and we're going to go ahead and do an inset real quick so when we inset something it's doing the same thing right like we have our quarter inset here but it does it four times so it Loops back around on it so and so that's just a loop you can have a loop anywhere in your model as long as it comes back to itself so you can push that in and subdivide that there you go we have something like this going on in this area now all right now a lot of those topology guides you see online or some YouTube videos even they get kind of confusing because they're talking about all these cool techniques of doing reductions so a lot of times you use endpoles for reduction as well and you'll say like take three vertices merge them together so press M merge at Center alt click alt shift click control X right and we'll get something like this now we control X here to quickly dissolve that let's dissolve selection by the way Ctrl X and if we GG twice we pull that back what we see here is we turn these three edges into one basically but we have all quads everywhere now you probably didn't realize it but what we've created here you guessed it three quads and an end pull all right so it's the exact same topology it just looks different so once you start looking for this in your models you're going to have much a much better time working on your models this impulse is extremely important like I was saying so I'm gonna select this Edge oh by the way you can alt s to scale along normals and that's what I did on that middle Edge so control click around this we'll hit Ctrl B we'll do a bevel Mouse will up once and when this subdivides we'll get this kind of shape here okay someone was asking how I do these really small little um crease lines and whatnot and that you can simply bevel an edge there's nothing fancy about this so if you Bevel an edge you Mouse will up once you'll see you get a little triangle here at the end if this triangle runs all the way out this way right so we merge oh it's kind of hard to see what's going on but we're going to merge that vertex to this vertex and we dissolve that there this is the same topology guys we just made it off of one single edge so we can grab that whole Edge down the middle well s push it in grab these and go all the way around with it now we can control B just control B okay Mouse will up once and there we go so we can actually create something like that as well now this may be a little bit stretched out here at the very end so before you do that you might want to try to hold that back a little bit on why and uh try it again see if that goes a little bit nicer this is part of balancing sometimes you just gotta push and pull your vertices around and try to get them to be in a correct position it'll sometimes they'll turn out nicer so do try to nudge things around a good bit and see if you can get them behaving the way you expect them to so that's just one example of doing a reduction perhaps or creating this kind of shape anyways but what we can also try is three to one so a lot of guys do this one they'll press GG twice they'll pull this back and turn off subdivision and edit mode they'll take these two vertices hit J and join them now these ones right here we can control X and dissolve so we can alt shift click these and control XM and what we'll see here is this is now being reduced from the three faces to one face right and so when you do that reduction there it seems like it's really fancy how we went about doing it but it's really not anything fancy put a loop cut down the middle you realize these are two quarter insets so basically we've created half of an inset and so we can do these kinds of things though as we're working on our models it's just different ways of approaching creating that that same topology over and over and over again basically so we can have better control over a mesh entirely okay as we work through our projects anyways so here we can see we got a plane now as I was saying you can use triangles and nons on planes and as long as they're flat they work out really well and that's what's going on here so if you ever want to just go crazy and take a knife tool and cut in a big shape or do some kind of weird cut like this perhaps maybe you want a bevel a Vertex you can hit Ctrl shift B Mouse wheel up a couple times you can do things like this guys you can see if we bevel that vertex we get a bunch of nonsense over here we're going to play with that here in a second Ctrl shift B again e that one didn't work out too well see if we can dissolve that we can't so we'll come back to it because we're gonna quickly bevel this one join it to here sometimes you have to have two edges throughout the shape so just keep that in mind and you might be able to dissolve this now sometimes you got to select the faces instead and hit Ctrl X you can see that went away but we can't extrude this down and we have this going on in here now which is quite nice problem is is we have this mess over here and so a quick way of cleaning up a lot of uh geometry problems is you can press a x and do limited dissolve and limited dissolve is going to dissolve anything that's flat so we can pipe in .05 over here so it doesn't try to dissolve our curves here that we just created you can see how that works out it works out pretty well in this particular area now sometimes you don't want to do the whole mesh at one time either so and let's go back just a second let's say we had something happening in here where the bevel was much higher resolution but we wanted to preserve that we would want to just select these faces here right so what we can do is we they're flat so we can press shift G and we can select code planner so plantar faces copelander faces and now we get that right so but now we can just limit dissolve this section instead if we wanted to and we can always go back and we can do things like bevels still perhaps so you might have to hit V to turn off the vertex bevel but we can go back and tweak that as well quite useful so that's just a fun way of going about doing something like that now of course you can always take a mesh a m merge at Center I'm going to turn on absolute grid snapping so increment absolute good snap I'm going to hold alt while orbiting to jump into a side view I press one I can select that one vertex we have here while we move this we can hold Ctrl snap it to the grid so we can start to lay out edges in this manner as well right or vertices and so we can create all kinds of cool looking engines here you could take an edge you can subdivide it when you subdivide an edge you can hit Ctrl B and you can actually bevel it control B and B that is so if you wanted to do that you could when you excuse me when you subdivide it as well you can actually increase the number of cuts so you can actually bump them up if you need more in a particular area like that you can also Loop cut these things as well so that's actually a little bit more easier to do that but whatever the case you can also extrude edges you'll see it creates a face you don't want the face you can just delete all new faces maybe we don't want that edge to delete all the edges and faces there we go so we have this shape now all right so we created more or less something like a string of vertices now we can press F and we could just fill that sometimes it won't fill correctly you might have to add additional you have to fill it in like little chunks and then add additional edges perhaps sometimes ingons just they're not able to be supported with just one face but um we can press e and then X bring it out in this direction so we could create blocking shapes like this very quickly which is quite nice because we know how subdivision is going to work we could get away with at minimum a chamfer on something like this this is going to get us off into the to the ballpark of working on this as a sub D mesh and we would have to start working with it possibly and turn it into quads everywhere and so now we're getting into the part of where you're going to want to run possibly your edges across Symmetry and this is going to save you a lot of time but it's going to become kind of boring when it comes to a 3D model as well where you start running across symmetry you can see here this segment because we did the chamfer creates a big end gone here so it's a little bit harder to work with these sometimes but sometimes they're not too bad either so you ever get stuck on the center of an edge that's the shift key that does that but um you just hit shift again and probably turn it off so you can see we can start running across the Symmetry here perhaps our symmetry is actually all the way over here in the corner so an edit mode I'm just move it over a little bit so our symmetry will be kind of like right here we're just going to use the origin point and we'll do a mirror modifier no not multi-res mirror we're going to bisect it and it'll do a number like this and so this is what we have going on now and this Edge flow is just basically running around but back around the uh the model here so we can apply the mirror perhaps sometimes you don't need these additional edges push them forward do things like that so this may be an acceptable game model at this point if you actually shade this Auto smooth and Max the auto smooth out okay and then you add a weighted normal modifier the uh the best thing here for this when you're using weighted normals is you need at least a minimum of a chamfered bevel on the edge is generally speaking for hard surface shapes anyway so that's going to help the shading quite a bit but it doesn't get everything perfect usually sometimes it's just a little uh nuances that are left so you might use something like base weighted normals I made a video talking about shading and how this how all this works but what you do is you use face influence keep sharp weighted normal right and then you select flat faces all in set face strength to strong all of them are medium by default so you want to set these ones strong and that should clean up the shade in a little bit more even if you have little errors remaining so that's something that's good to remember there all right now this will subdivide with chamfers unfortunately one of the side effects of using chamfers is it kind of creates like a little bulging effect here right so it's going to be a little bit of a bulging effect on the side and that's okay if you have things that are like soft Plastics or rubbery in nature sometimes that actually looks good or if you're trying to do stylized assets maybe for film or whatever you can get away with those chamfers like that it actually makes things look a little bit more soft and Squishy and you know they just work out a little bit better in some situations than doing the hard edges with three three edges anyways normally you need three edges to hold a sharp corner anyway so that's what I'm getting at instead we're using two on that one so over here I got a Boolean in gun model that I had quickly tossed together and so bullion in guns workflow a lot of times you're using you know booleans of course but making big shapes and you're just cutting into them with the blend modif modifier now you can use bull tools or box cutter add-ons like uh like those uh bullsholes comes with blender box cutter you got to buy it's a purchase that or purchase add-on so but you can see how this is behaving we got these big end guns here sometimes you have to support these things to keep the shading good and you might have to add additional Loop Cuts here or there across the model or just knife Cuts even because the edge flows here tend to die off quite a lot you know you don't have like a continuous loop going around the whole model always and so you know that's what you're going to end up running into with with this workflow you'll get used to it but it's basically you know when you understand how Edge flow works and you understand how to do loops you'll understand how these are working as well right like where they would you know where they're supposed to come back around the model they won't actually be able to do that or they won't do that so but they are placed in kind of the same positions as you would normally work with a subdivision model so it's kind of kind of a it's basically similar it's what I'm gonna die whereas subdivision of course you know you run every Edge and these do take a lot longer to set up and sometimes you can see when you don't have good topology perhaps or it doesn't really matter if it Shades correctly you know in this case we got a little bit of an error here but if it's shading correctly in that area this is technically okay if you're just baking but if you're trying to animate or deform something like this this is going to start to have problems you can kind of check things with um by using the proportional edit tool or you can use like a bin modifier if you're trying to deform your meshes just give them a little test by seeing if they kind of behave the way you expect them to by doing the deformations this way and so subdivision is not as limited as you think you can see that's actually a big error but um it's not as limited as you think because if you set up good quads you can deform your mesh very easily usually right and so you can see what's going on here when they're nice and perfect quads it works well but if you have something like this going on it might still deform but it's just it might give you different shading results that don't look that good that's what you're looking for that's technically bad topology if you're trying to do deformable match right now of course what I had going on up here is I was just doing a reduction and I had applied a subdivision so we don't see the original topology no more but you can see here that we have the quads with the end poles so this was basically doing an inset in this area or three to one reduction so you can see how that can kind of geek up your topology across the whole model possibly and say sometimes you have to be really clever with how you're going to lay it all out and how you're going to work with it this example we did earlier you know it's very simple in nature if you were to go ahead and keep working on that in the mirrored across the center and create a little mirrored effect here it's this complicated looking thing was basically this shape like it's only a little bit further worked it's not that much and you can see it starts to look pretty nice when you do this and you take your time with it and you have a little bit of fun create some nice trim sheet effects or textures for environments and things like that if you needed to or a hard surface detail because even something like this you know you could add a you could add a simple deform modifier and we'll put that at the top here and for this particular one we're going to do a Bend and you'll see it bends all kinds of weird ways this add-on is called the modifier list add-on you can create an empty with it real quick and it references the empty here so all I have to do is pull this off to the side perhaps let me hold Ctrl and snap it real quick you can actually snap it to the vertex Maybe right here sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't but we'll get it close to the end there and what we can do is we can change the direction now see if any of these are working sometimes it acts weird and you have to rotate these things so I might rotate it on x negative 90 perhaps you can see now it's bending in this direction so that's cool you could bend it up in that manner but we could also maybe bend it up on one of these other ones so we'll do X and we'll Bend here and wrap it around into the shape of a cylinder so we can do things like this I'm going to move it all empty and the shape and you'll see that there's this nice split here so after the simple deform you add a weighted or excuse me add a weld modifier you can see it welds it back together put this weld before the subdivision and there we go closes it up it looks good and it's all pretty much non-destructive well the the bending of it's non-destructive at least so semi non-destructive but the the base shape there when you create nice even topology where it's mostly all quads it has good Edge flows and you can sometimes get away with e-polls on curves usually you know this is a he pulls and impulse on curvy shapes can cause problems right but in some situations they work out just fine and you'll have to kind of figure out how to go about doing that that's going to be one of your most challenging things you'll end up doing is trying to learn how to work on cylindrical shapes and spherical shapes and using epoles and impulse at the same time but this is just a good example of that you can see when we use that simple to form all these are being pushed out into the correct spot as if it was a cylinder whereas if we were modeling on a cylinder we probably would have a hard time matching that so this is an excellent technique that you could utilize to get pretty good results here so this is one that is commonly used in Kmart especially so and I'm sure any other type of 3D modeling as well but overall let's just make one shape real quick that first one was kind of a little bit rough but let's just do one more shape and see if I can't add some Loop Cuts in here I'm going to subside it one time apply that okay and so we have this shape going on now so let's say we wanted a scene going around this thing just like we did the cylinder there we can cut wherever we need to go we want to do an inpole we can do that and we can send this down below it okay go across the symmetry and what it'll do is eventually when we add that mirror I'm going to symmetrize with mesh machine add-on I'm going to turn remover done at Center off so we have an edge now going exactly where we want it we can turn this into guess it hit Ctrl B and set inset hold Ctrl bam so when we subdivide this again we get this result all right this is something you might want to do at some point on your 3D models it's going to be up to you it's going to be a judgment call now this is just one way you could have went about doing it you could actually do the end set like that but you could also maybe do um just the edge here possibly and you select everything in one side so you do selection methods Loops Edge Loop Springs these are all useful Loop inner region and loop boundary Loop what I just did was the loop inner region so you can select a set of edges like so right and now you do Loop inner region and then now you got that if you want to switch it you can go to the other side there so that one's really useful but we can separate that perhaps at some point if the subdivisions match here and the vertices match each other we'll have a really clean uh meet up between these two shapes right so later on we could do something like add a solidify modifier and we might be able to push that out a little bit if I can get it to work I guess it's not going to work for some reason let's do it before the subdivision all right so if we push that out I'm going to copy the value here and we do another solidify modifier and we can paste that value so Ctrl C and control v as you hover over a field so Ctrl C copies control V we'll paste all right and the subdivisions kind of curl in the edges here a couple ideas on how you can deal with that you could try using weighted bevels which is a bevel modifier with weights applied to it which I'll make another video on later but there's also creases possibly so you can do something like select Loops boundary loops and you can maybe add creases to that whole thing and sometimes that'll hold it in place as well a little bit better in this case a lot of times you're going to end up having to use the solidify so you put solidify before subdivision and then what you're going to do is you're just going to apply it later oh side note here that's forward slash a second isolate it it has an interior side now if you want the interior you can keep that but you don't necessarily have to have it you can do only rim right and so that also is useful if you want to keep it non-manifold oh a solid mesh by the way that's completely airtight is a manifold mesh if it's got empty it's got spaces on the edges of it it's a non-manifold mesh okay and so what ends up happening here is that once you apply that solidify you could try adding Loop Cuts if you wanted to but you'll have to make sure they kind of match between the two meshes but if I just want this to be sharper in this area I could just add maybe a loop cut through here and I might be able to do that as well so we can apply that solidify we'll do that on both sides here and now we'll do this one and it should just keep a little bit sharper in that area we could also try beveling The Edge that's another another technique but if we want to keep like a little bit of softness to it just adding that additional Loop cut should work out pretty well for you you might end up with a little bit of a gap with this though sometimes that does occur you might have to shift things around just ever so slightly to get that to go away but you see it's not too bad right now so I think we could work with that one there's all kinds of ways of creating panels and whatnot but this is what you're looking for with good topology you're looking to create nice clean edges lines as simplified as possible it's not always going to be possible but the better your mop the better you're at at doing this kind of work like this this is going to be better for like your topology is going to be better overall generally speaking so practice creating really clean nice meshes first before you get into a bunch of chaotic messy stuff like this this is something that is um you know while it's it's important to understand what to do when you start increasing detail on models and you start increasing the polygon counts because a lot of these shapes later on you might take them and you might do like a level one subdivision on it you might convert it to a mesh later right and so now we have a more detailed mesh here but it's the base topology that we once had as well and so we can go in and start adding additional elements later when we want to do things like that one little bevel perhaps remember that I did earlier so we might be able to get away with doing that in here in this area let me pull this a certain proportional edit off maybe pull that one in a little bit we'll merge these two right here and pull that one in a little bit and then merge them so Loop cut alt s lept more control number pad plus to select more now I'm doing the boundary Loop which I have hotkey select Loops boundary Loop and we can do a bevel here as well okay and so with that subdivides again now we can start adding additional details like this all day long not a big big deal as you go up in resolution of course when you want to hold certain shapes you're going to make need to make sure you have the topology to support that as well so if you wanted to do like a push in here you really need to have two additional edges at minimum on the inside here and two on this axis as well because if we start to do an inset and we inset again and hold Ctrl push that in you'll see that these are going to round here and if you don't want these types of edges rounding out a lot of times you're going to have to take these other edges and slam them over like this and so what ends up happening is you can tighten that bevel up basically now it will shift the topology a little bit so it's technically getting a little bit flat in here now because of such a dramatic shift so you want to do these at the right resolutions the right density so that way you can utilize these kinds of edges to tighten up Corners perhaps and you want to make sure you push this in at the right density as well now our base mesh our base geometry there right is going to dictate our Edge flows for the most part so if we don't want to do spend a bunch of we don't want to spend a bunch of time cleaning up Edge flows later on we get them right from the start we won't have as many problems we'll be able to go through and do the the additional edits that we need to do so we can start creating some really complicated looking stuff out of those base meshes even if it's not really all that complicated because it's just some more pushings and whatnot on a side note you can always grab a set of quads like this and you can also do Loop tools Circle you could turn off flatten and a lot of times that'll try to preserve the shape here it doesn't always get it right and we can inset inset hold Ctrl and set again you can also do things like that possibly okay that's just with the vanilla blender tools but you can see it delivers a pretty reasonable result there it's not big not a big big deal what I personally like to do though is I use the Machine Tools add-on and I'll turn on Surface slide okay this is like a temporary shrink wrap modifier so then I can just go ahead and do Loop tools and circle I can even flatten it it wouldn't matter because it's shrink wrapping basically and so if I do an inset or something like that I can always add another Circle to it I can keep working this I can rotate it and move it around and do all kinds of fun stuff here now I may distort the mesh a little bit but you'll see here once I turn that surface slide back off okay and I insert that hold Ctrl and setting in we'll get a subdivision like so and for the most part this delivers a pretty reasonable result as well especially if you need to shift things around a little bit perhaps so do check out the Machine Tools add-on surface slide is on the modes Pi I have it shortcuted to my quick favorites but um installment modes Pi so when you're in edit mode you hit the Tab Key you'll have the modes of Pi and as long as you turn it onto the preferences of the add-on and you'll find surface slide on that modes pi and edit mode so your edit mode hit the tab key it'll be there basically what I was getting at anyway so that's topology in a nutshell it's really uh you know like I said it's not going to be a fully exhaustive video we're not going to jump into every aspect of it but it's really the balance in the relationship of your geometry to create a nice clean geometry is ideal create a nice clean subdivision models is a good way to practice that but also it comes into play with Boolean and gun as well right and you see this just has different rules for that topology compared to subdivision perhaps to some degree they're very relatable though and so as you go through all these little practice exercises or you take careful note of the impulse and the e-polls and all that fun stuff you know this will make more and more sense as you work with your topology and it'll actually become kind of easy to deal with after a little while so one last thing I want to mention the e-poll a lot of times it's used in what's called saddles or where like I was saying that the geometry wants to kind of all flow together into a certain specific shape so a lot of times this happens on like the chest of a character near the armpit and so you can see here the e-pole here on this kind of curve also works out pretty well but if this was a hard surface shape on the other hand you know you might want to do your bevel and do a number like that right so that way it pushes that e-pole a little bit further away you can see when it subdivides now or the uh the optimal display here you can see it pushes that that you pull back away from that edge a little bit so that's a good thing to recognize as well one last thing I kind of skipped over I'm going to talk about bevel shape so when you're working on a model and it's a hard surface model in particular you can do bevels like this right and subdivide them and you'll get that nice smooth curve there that's fine but you can also do bevels with a shape of one this is going to be known as a Korean bubble and so this is going to be better if you want to keep your edges a little bit crispier right so just to keep them a little bit tighter in a sense and it'll look better on hard surface shapes generally speaking so if you want to go with that you can in fact use it in that manner now once you start understanding all this stuff and subdivision kind of becomes fun for you you'll realize that you can employ creases into subdivision workflow so you know you will be using creases possibly or the weighted bevels and if you can get used to using weighted bevels and creases and working with the topology in this manner you're going to feel a lot more comfortable creating any 3D model for the most part the only other thing I would say is Boolean in gone is kind of like a different way of working that has its own peculiarities to it so you would want to play around with that one as well so thanks subdivisions or standard modeling is really the base of everything where you're working with triangles quads and guns but subdivisions like an extension of standard modeling Boolean and gone workflow is kind of an extension of standard modeling and so when you kind of play back and forth with those two ideas you realize that all of what I'm showing you here is more or less standard modeling in a nutshell you know you're using these faces these are your kind of like your Lego blocks to your 3D model you notice that we're not seeing anything outside of this we're seeing vertices or we're seeing um vertices edges triangles quads and guns we're not going into complex ingons we're trying to stay away from things that have many many edges coming out of the e-pole but when you keep your models as simple as possible they're much more you're much more capable of managing them and working with them and so but these are your foundations this is why I wanted to show you these things in particular because with this knowledge at least even if you know you're working on a project and there's not a tutorial on it or something like that hopefully you can take this information now and you can start to look for those things and start to piece it back together on what you need to do or accomplish on on that model that you're working on and so one last thing I do want to mention though whenever you're trying to create anything it does not start pretty okay it doesn't always start pretty sometimes you got to do these blockouts they may even look like this but you probably wouldn't want to do the bevels everywhere you might just want to use like the standard sharp edges and then you can convert this to a subdivision later on much easier that way so it might start with like booleans and Boolean and guns and then you might have triangles and all kinds of other fun stuff going on but when you're working your models don't pay attention to what you have sometimes like don't Focus so much on what you have focus on what it is you want to create you know if I want a shape through here and I'm in the blockout phase I'm just going to create exactly the geometry I want even if it's a little sloppy and I'm just going to make that happen Okay and then I'll figure out how to do a subdivision on it later so if I needed this pushed in here for whatever reason I might push that in and you might have to rebuild the model from scratch might be able to work the one you have into the subdivision model that you need so just keep that in mind you might be doing this in the shade Auto smooth kind of sharpen those edges real quick hopefully nope that didn't work anyways we're going to ignore the shading for just a second but we can start to see some areas where we can start to maybe like uh combine things so if I press J through there and J through there you might end up with something like that okay and we'll see this edge here maybe this one needs to run around in this area I don't know I'm having such an issue on this one but it wasn't cutting for some reason all right so maybe we need to run that one around a little bit this can join here and this can join here this is going to get harder if you start doing like weird glancing angles that go across the model buy it for the most part it doesn't get too much more difficult I'm gonna press am and merge by distance I think we got a couple vertices hanging out in here somewhere should it be able to inset but that's not working there so I'm going to dissolve that real quick and inset again so you can dissolve an edge if something's not working or add an edge if needed and then you can add that edge back if that also makes sense okay so when this subdivides now turn it back on we're doing level twos I think or level three so okay so if we don't mind it being soft like that we can leave that perhaps but we can always go back through the shape and try to do maybe like a bevel here and so we're using that shape of one so it's going to be a little bit sharper all right and then other times when you're really trying to hold these edges you might have to Bevel them or you can use creases sometimes but you'll see here we're going to get kind of a very different thing going on here we're going to have to increase the resolution to support some of this geometry and so when you're working on curvy shapes this can often oftentimes lead to like little flat areas okay so you want to watch out for that but you can see we have to work these kind of in this manner where we we go out in the Edge from the edge here like this a lot of little tricks along the way on how you approach certain types of corners and stuff like that which I won't be able to cover in this video uh entirely but these little tricks when you're watching other tutorials now you'll start seeing what they're doing and how they're they're working that mesh and you can see little things like this we can merge these back to here we can GG twice out GG twice out this can be a quad so you're looking for a little little ways to work your mesh like this all right and so now we're starting to work this little front section out it's starting to look a lot better than it once did and unfortunately we would have to go through and maybe do the other ones as well sometimes we've got things we don't actually need like we probably don't need that when we get rid of that and so there we go so we can work this into quads as needed basically and just for the heck of it I know we're going to end the video some time ago and up we'll just keep going though let's just do a triangle real quick I just want to talk about it when you are working a mesh you want to create a triangle you want to subdivide something like this and it's there's a couple things that may or may not need to occur but a lot of times it's simpler than you probably thought when it's weird to Bevel this whole area real quick you'll see kind of the topology that you need okay it's not as crazy as you probably thought it was so we have more or less we have four quads here so kind of see what's going on here one two three and four right so and then this is one two three and four so we get this kind of subdivision going on in a nutshell now the reason it split apart like that is because these need the additional edges going out as well you have to support that topology so don't overthink your models they're they're really a lot simpler than you probably thought they were so it's like oh I added a bevel okay that's great nothing nothing complicated about that this one here I'm gonna run through the shape all the way to the other side here and this bottom one here I guess I didn't select the edge or something I don't know what I did exactly we're gonna have to run back through here to this side to that side and we can see we worked that out as well let's say we needed more density in this middle section here and this is what I really wanted to show you the most how do you subdivide a triangle right well we saw how how it worked when we subdivided it with level one subdivision so it has a pole at the middle so whenever you run into a triangle and you're trying to figure out like well what did I do with this shape I know like how do I work this thing it's not as complicated as you probably thought it's the same as what it subdivides you put the dot in the middle the vertex send this out in that direction and you send this out in that direction now you got your three quads and your end pull right and that's it that's how you that's how you do those kinds of shapes like that except this one I guess I cut right there by accident so get rid of that one all right so that subdivides now no problems it's very sharp still so hopefully you learned a lot in this video and you enjoyed it hope it answers a lot of questions for you guys that are struggling with topology and creating geometry that's really the goal of it is kind of open up your mind to the ideas these fundamental building blocks if you would of your 3D models so now when you're looking at your models you don't feel so lost and confused about what's actually happening with it so if you did like the video and you enjoyed it leave a like subscribe to the channel comment below what you thought about this one and I'll see if maybe I'll do some more in the future like this perhaps all right anyways thanks for watching check you out next though

Channel: PzThree

Views: 125,318

Keywords: tutorial, how, to, guide, blender, 3d, modeling, game, concept, art, design, visual, use, tools, does, graphics, indepth, advanced, best, practice, artist, uv, mapping, unreal, engine, addons, pzthree, effects, detailed, pro, studio, lighting, materials, maps, substance, painter, designer, mesh, for, sale, face, vertex, color, modifier, decal, baking, environment, hard, surface, models, asset, pack, download, free, 3.3, assets, indie, kit, bash, normal, unity, games, freelance, contract

Id: MD1QmdqXRfc

Length: 48min 43sec (2923 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023