Change Your Understanding of Topology In Six Minutes

hello guys my name's Rob this channel is called decoded and today I'm going to show you the only method you'll ever need to solve any topology problem bad understanding of topology is the number one thing holding back most beginner and intermediate 3d models it's something I personally struggled with for a long time until I found this method so before you skip this part of the video I'll quickly explain what we're going to do today I'm going to show you an example of a hard topology problem that a model of might face then I'll show you the method to tackle any kind of topology finally we'll come back to our problem and we'll use the same method to fix the topology super quickly ok so first I'll show you the problem let's say we have a standard cube here and it doesn't really matter what this is it's not gonna make a lot of sense but let's say that at some cuts in okay and extrude out a face on either side right let's say this was some machinery or whatever your model and we need three ridges down here right we're looking at the the drawing the concept are at the four door it's got three ridges so we add in five lip cuts right there for sorry we're in four lip cuts okay and we select this this Ness we extrude it out in theory no problem we've modeled what we want to model the problem is now the topology is ruined we've added these lip cuts all the way around the entire mesh if these were fingers on the end of a person's arm and character's arm then you now would have added these little cuts going all the way up the arm that would be going potentially up to the head they'd be going all over the model right so how we solve this well what I wouldn't do is I'm going to use a plan to show the method right and I'm going to generate and with a stick that's on the view okay and all you need no basically for for the topology is how to change different numbers of chases once you can do that you can do anything so let's say we have five faces on an inch right so again for four cuts to make five faces we have these five phases and we want to get it down to three right so we extrude this down and if we grab the middle one okay G and Zed to move it up look what happens there this is now record one two three if we'd give it a bottom this is a quarter now and one two three there's your three edges we can extrude that down we've we started with five faces here we now have three okay and we can obviously scale that on the X to make the faces like the same size now you have three same sized faces roughly we can just do that again if we grab these faces move the middle one up and then we join these then we now have one so we've quickly went from five phases to three two one when you keep going like that if we extrude down again okay and I'm just going to put a cut over the middle right and then if I just grab these you dissolve them so how do we join this up properly well what we do is we use the knife tool and I'm going to connect this up to here then I'm just going to get rid of the one at the side edge here and now if you look at this wrong but that's never quad this has four sides that has four sides but we start off with one edge and we now have two four different phases we can do that again on either side for four so from these two edges under sticks through the stone again if we let add some cuts okay and then just get rid of most of it rights we have these cuts down the middle what we can do here is just the same thing we did there but twice what I mean is if we go to the corners just like we did connect those up and then we get rid of the edge loops the edge face is sorry on either side that's a cord that's a cord that's a quad they're all quads everywhere so what we've done there is we've quickly went from five phases to three phases to one to two to four right this is how we'll use that because that still might not make a lot of sense so I'll show you how would put that into practice coming back to our model over here right we have five phases just like we did over here so I'm going to do and then I deliver good okay and I'm going to use double J to move this over if we grab this and move it up like we did before use care to cut cut across this and get rid of these two we can now get rid of these two edge loops there they're not needed and then if we do this again if we are be in another cut slide it over to here we can do the same thing we can slide this one up you can use the knife to cut across there select these two edges here dissolve them and then we can just dissolve these edge loops here and really quickly what we've done is we've went from having five edges in lip codes running all over to now which is back to one it's not interfering with the rest of our topology if we look back over here those edge loops are now gone obviously you would have to do what I just did on the top layer you would have to do on the bottom side as well because at the moment this is like bad topology that's an area that and then just work through and go okay well if it needs to be seven you can have a four or two in a one or whatever so I hope this made sense guys I hope you liked this video if you did please give it a like and subscribe to the channel for more videos I put more kinda up every week

Channel: DECODED

Views: 612,217

Keywords: tutorial, blender, 2.8, retopo, topology, 2.81, 3d modeling, retopology, blender 3d, Blender 3D modeling, blender 2.81 retopology, good topology, topology guide, topology basics, blender modeling tutorial, software, topology junctions, computing

Id: HGL6QpVRyXk

Length: 6min 57sec (417 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LamerDeluxe]

Great video! Limiting the amount of edges while still using quads everywhere can be a real puzzle.

[u/THE_GREAT_97]

im quite new to blender why is it important to have good topology?

[u/boyzinthewoodz]

This is great. Unique solution to a common problem and very well explained. Kinda surprised how little attention this got.

[u/Dheorl]

Nice video, hate the title.

[u/RobotsAndChocolates]

How about it one minute? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qIxrMSRlPA

[u/qwiglydee]

The 2-to-1 transition makes new loopcuts to turn 90 degree and run onto the rest of the mesh, but now in totally weird direction. Does it makes any sense?

I would prefer a narrow triangle there, so it quite predictably blocks such loopcuts.