Edge FLOW lecture

okay guys all right so let's look at this all right so we're talking about edge flow and that's the subject for today and like I said it may seem a little bit in a vacuum but you guys really quickly will be hitting this stop coming off like in the following weeks so just so bear with me and just just understand now this builds right on top of the three points to a curve thing okay we're gonna talk about what looks what works what doesn't work and then also talk about what's presentable because there's a difference okay there's a difference between what looks what looks good and what doesn't you there's some tricks you can do in 3d modeling and it will look right in the render but the moment you if you're a modeler the moment you display your mesh to somebody and if it does if the mesh doesn't look good like you don't have good topology that makes your work look less professional or even amateur you know so that's that's one of the things that I learned as I was working and going along I was doing things wrong even though in the render they look right but in in the big picture if I was to send out a reel and I wanted to get into a good company that knew like their guy knew modeling you know that was hiring me he would look at my stuff and that person would probably like hmm you know like he understand he can get a good looking good in the end but it's not really he doesn't understand the full picture okay so we're gonna talk about that all right I've got this in my channel box this is called holding edges wrong and then I have a holding edges right where we're gonna do it up here so there's two examples okay so for instance a lot of the times we're gonna be smoothing our matches like we're gonna do a smooth mush preview so if I just take this and I hit three you can see this smooth mesh preview is a better sorry guys there we go that's better beautiful all right so that's hitting three on my keyboard I'm gonna go ahead and just bring it back to one and I'm gonna actually put a smooth on here okay so let me turn the wireframe on so you can see it a little bit better okay this is not good for one major reason which which which edge which point is wrong what do you think does anybody want to take a guess at it yes this one right here okay this is our problem all right we don't want a crit we'll call this a critical edge like a critical turn when you're doing a turn you don't typically want a polygon like ending on that curve okay you want a nice edge flow through it but you don't want it ending on that curve okay so let me show you this is what so let's say we wanted to hold this edge let me undo that and we'll go back to five and let's say I wanted to hold this edge so if I wanted a nice crease here it takes three points to hold the edge right so right now when I smooth it it's going between this point on the end let's get to our verts this point here this point here and this point here that's our three points right so you can see it's interpolating between the two and I just accidentally switched to my animation all right so what we want to do is we want to hold this let's say we want that to be a tight corner okay so we can take our cut tool and this is what I did for years I didn't know this was wrong okay it works but it's not right so I can cut here and cut here and now if we want to tight corner we've got those three points there instead of stretching between these three points it's going to stretch between these three points and I can go ahead and I can hit three on my keyboard and now you can see I'm getting a tight corner but we still have this stretched weird polygon right in the middle okay all right and let's just for giggles say we want to go ahead and hold this corner as well so I'm gonna go ahead and drop an edge loot there drop an edge loop there all right and right now let's go ahead and we'll drop them there and there too so now every edge will be kind of like a corner it should bevel and this technically will work in the render like this this looks okay in the render but it's not actually good topology so I'm gonna introduce you guys to something called some people call it fencing some people call it what some people say it's like a sidewalk you just have to get into your mind that there's there's basically ways that you turn corners when you're polygonal modeling okay and and political modeling differ from nerves a little bit okay so just take these we are working with polygons here all right so this is what we're gonna do instead of doing it this way what we really need to do is we'll take our our target weld and I'm gonna cut I'm gonna go ahead and put these two to the middle there see that so now imagine you're walking down the sidewalk right you're walking you're walking it turns the corner okay you what you you know they could put in a chair in an edge here and they could have a block there but why not just put one one edge right there in the middle and then you can turn the corner now let me show you why that's better okay we're gonna move these off because we don't need these anymore and now if I go ahead and hit three on my keyboard we get the same scenario we get the same edge hold let me get out of the V and object mode we get the same but see this this one polygon here that's no longer being stretched as far and it's in it's in the middle so we we have this this edge right here this critical like this critical edge where it turns that stretched polygon isn't hitting it that's going to be important in the big picture okay so let me go back to for this now we also when we're showing off our mashings we typically want our meshes to look balanced and even is much as possible without there's like this level of having our meshes look more quad and balanced and also not being is too heavy so some people think to make a quad and balance they can go ahead and just add subdivisions to it and it'll it'll look better but you also want your model to be as low poly as it can be but still actually look like it should work the reason why is because if their resource heavy on the graphics card on the computer so if we want this to be presentable not so we're getting you this presentable part like this will work just fine right but we're gonna get into the presentable part the presentable part is we want like a balanced topology okay so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna move these a little bit like so and start balancing these out all right now we have a problem though this polygon is even worse okay so let's go ahead and we're going to we're just gonna add another edge through now here's why this is well here let me just get it let me add the edge first I'll explain something okay so if I if I go ahead and hold control you can see it goes off in there I don't want it actually to go there I want this to go to about there and then come out the middle here okay good answer and then I can just clear that up by putting one right there alright so now we have more of a balanced topology if I wanted to I could even add if I want to make it really look nice I can add that in and that's pretty that's pretty good that's pretty good um you get away with the most leave what you get the most leeway in your flat areas okay so if you ever have it like you have to have a triangle or hang on or something like that the only place you're really gonna get away with that is usually in a planner okay a triangle you can get away with in a few like in a hidden spot like inside the nostril or something like that no one's gonna see them but but other than that like typically you don't want any of that though when you're showing off your portfolio you want it to be all quality okay so we just we just fixed we just fix that now let me show you the fast way so I did that from taking the wrong way and turning into the right way this is how you would do this without doing that so it's really simple you're gonna cut cut cut and actually if you remember cutting the mug it's kind of the same principle okay when we cut the hole in the mug we just cut there enter okay here's our three points right we want to hold this edge hold that edge alright we're gonna go ahead and just do this cut to there here here and then here and then for right now I'll just I'm gonna leave the rest the way it is the rest of the edge flow but I will have to do this I'm gonna remove these two actually before I do that let me go and I'm gonna connect these okay and then I'm going to remove these two edges there we go okay and because I Manuel I will go ahead and do that too all right so what we've done right here oh one more edge this edge should be gone too there we go so what we've done right here is we've done basically kind of the same thing as here we've just done it faster it's clean you could put a middle edge in here now now so here's the beauty of the middle edge now so if I wanted to balance this out a little bit more this is now an edge flow you can see I can actually end an edge loop in right into the middle okay and I don't have to I don't have to keep cutting around so this is what you have to remember when you're establishing your corners see this 1 2 3 right 1 2 3 there's a tight corner on the outside it's almost always gonna look like this like if you have a box the outside corners are gonna kind of look like that where they're where you have a 90 degree like this or whatever the degree is you're doing ok the inside corners are gonna look like this where you're gonna have to run at fencing around it you run it fencing and then you have these three tight ones and go off to the fencing okay all right so if you guys have your paper in your hands start start sketching on top of your saw and draw this out okay the middle this middle one is not as important right now I'm gonna remove that just this part right here I can actually let me wireframe that may be easier to see okay in the critical areas that you're thinking about is where you're turning the corners okay look how this looks like a sidewalk in the middle you see how you can kind of you have a flow and if I actually selected an edge ring it actually selects all these in a row that becomes important the more the model gets complex because you know selecting edges having balanced topology all that stuff is going to just learn more come into play okay we're starting off with like super Baker right so maybe a note would be like sidewalk and seeing whatever you want to call it just call it I'm gonna call it fencing that's what most people call it as far as I know all right this all be video so you guys can you guys can watch this later all right so now we're gonna look at the 3d realm all right so we that's just a flat plane so now this is basically the same thing and I watch this I'm going to turn off the wireframe on shaded now look at this I what I did is I put a the same pretty called mesh display and I went soften edge right and I soften the whole thing here's what it when this is done when you hold these edges you can see it looks like it's beveled even though I really haven't actually put any smooth on this yet I can select this object to three on my keyboard and now it looks really nice right but even without that three it actually looks pretty decent and that's what should happen when you're modeling correctly your stuff without being smooth should look really close to what it looks like smooth when you have the same smoothing group over everything you have the sit when you have your soften edge on the on the models okay I when I'm doing a high-end model I don't even use soften edge I mean I'm sorry I don't even use hard edges I never use hard edges with a high-end model it's all everything's soft but I just know how to hold my geometry by remembering those three points right anytime I turn a corner I know I'm gonna need three points if I need a tight bevel they're gonna be closer together if I want something that smooths more they'll be further apart okay all right so this was the same way that I showed you the original one here this one here all right what I'm gonna do is it's a say it's it's the exact same principle just gonna be doing the same thing again all right so I'm gonna go ahead and move I'm gonna go ahead and just cut this up really play so watch remember we're gonna make a fence all right we're gonna remove I got one more fence to make let's see this one right here this one goes all the way over to here so I'm just giving you more of the same here all right so we remove that then we don't need this and we don't need this get rid of those it tooks something out that I didn't want oh it took the whole thing out let's see actually we can get rid of these there we go okay so in just a couple stops we're almost there and then I would just want to balance my mesh out a little bit all right so my my verts are super close to each other here so if I select all these make sure you got the right ones and slide these over a little bit or you can leave these here actually not what I look at this I have a triangle don't I all right these gotta go actually am i doing these gotta go just right there and let's make sure the bottom is good I'm gonna leave the bottom alone I'm not gonna really mess with it you guys look at the picture once they just do the top I'm just gonna deselect good all right there we go okay so now we have the edge flow again all right all of these edges if I select here double click here see how it goes all the way around the ring that's the kind of thing that we're looking for we want that kind of topology now if you wanted to smooth this out you can go ahead and you can actually balance these out let me show you this so I can grab all three of these this and just gonna deselect those deselect those so I just want these these middle ones right here you can go to your edge slide tool which is in mesh tools edge slides somewhere in here am I wrong slide edge why do I always say edge light I don't know all right you can start balancing these things out by just kind of moving them back and forth now the bottom one I didn't fix oh it's looking bad but you see right there how like if you need a curve like that you want like an Archie curve okay you can start off with them with just straight edges and balance it out like that okay pay no attention to the bottom all right okay so that's that's basically just so what I'm really getting you guys that come away with here is that when you want a tight bevel or any kind of any kind of tourney in the corner you're gonna have to have three points okay when it's inside it's gonna usually look like this and when it's an outside corner it's usually gonna look like that almost every single time so that's just something to remember okay and this was just an extension of it okay so if I went ahead now when I smooth this it looks nice right looks real pretty okay if you do it if you smooth something like this okay you start to get uneven topology you can't you couldn't even get an arch like this with this piece it wouldn't work the right way and give you I mean you could do it but it wouldn't look good it wouldn't it wouldn't be balanced okay so that's that's you know this stuff will take time don't expect you guys to get all this stuff overnight okay but here here's where it gets really important because this is where it gets tricky you guys are gonna have stuff like cylinders you're like oh I got the cylinder and I need something to extrude off the cylinder or I need to put like I can see all kinds of examples of cylinders around here I'm just grabbing different cylinders and sometimes like this thing for instance has a cut into it how do you put it cut into it and and still have it remain a cylinder shape okay so if you went and said okay I need to have let's just show you what this looks like if I remove this and this this and this all right if I remove those and I and I go ahead and smooth this you say okay if you needed a tight corner something was more mechanical this isn't gonna work right so you can see that we need to hold this in this corner like we're just imagining we need to hold this corner now the usual answer that people come up with is okay I'll just put these edges in like this but once you hit three on your keyboard there you guys see what happens there okay see the straightedge right there that straightedge is caused by the fact of what you have three points to occur and the three points are close together so they're holding that into a tight bevel all right that's gonna keep happening if you put those three points in it so what we have to learn is we have to learn how do we isolate it off of the outside of the circle okay we want to go ahead and let's go all right this outside circle needs to say stay basically untouched it needs to be its own cylinder just like it was in the beginning so I know that what I actually have to do first off is I'm just gonna get rid of these because these are what's really messing it up all right so I'm just target welding these together now I could hit three now and you can look at it and you can say well yeah it kind of looks better but this is bad topology in the middle that's really bad you don't want that all right you look like an amateur when you do stuff like that so okay but what we have here is we're gonna we're gonna work on making the same shape that we did in the other one all right we're gonna actually remove go ahead and remove that that it's actually it's close to the same shape this one's gonna be a little bit different we remove this okay so so you see how we still have that fence but if we hit three now we get the same thing it's curved right we don't want that we want to hold our bevel this is pretty easy we just drop one right there and then we go into our verts I like to turn on edge slide so I keep my my edge in the right spot or my verts on the right edge you know move that over a little bit we can move this one over a little bit move this one over a little bit and now we've got we got what it's tired it's almost there if we really wanted to we could just even add another one right three three points so then we can go now it's even tighter okay so now we've got our good curve otherwise it's interpolate in between one of these out here but look at the outside now so what we've done is we've Eisley and trust me I wish I knew this I think what I was when I was in school it may seem in a vacuum right now but as you guys are going along you'll come into problems like this that you need to solve and this is gonna help you solve it all right so let's go back to our our one so that's that's how we would hold that and you can adjust these a little bit more if you need to you know you can say well I want this more off there I want this one a little tighter there or so on and so forth and you can work on how tight this this little angle is right here okay all right let's move on now the big one okay the big one you guys notice that when we did the coffee mug I made an 8 sided cylinder and then we cut that and what we did is we cut that cylinder into into a basically a crosshair if you will like this we just like we cut it into this cross shape like this okay I did that purposely because that is like the easiest way to cut a hole all right why does an eight sided circle work so well did anybody tell me we've been talking about this somebody paid go ahead there's eight vertices and subdivided plane that is true and that's part of why it works but think of the arcs okay let me show you real quick here all right let's go ahead I think I just hit the wrong button ah here we go let's do that all right we're talking arch think arcs trust me I didn't know this either so all right one two three and these like that so you basically have quarters that are basically ours they're your perfect arc right so when you're looking at this you have one two three one two three one two three one two three all put together in their nice little package and the crosshairs of it when you have a crosshair of other meshes like this for instance it's really easy to cut that eight sides right into there so so this is going to be a repeat of basically what you saw in the mug so what I do to cut a hole if we if we have the best case scenario which is this you can see I put it the name of it as easy hole that sounds terrible anyway there's no connotation that even think about that last night when I wrote it all right so when I'm doing this all I'm doing is cutting a diamond shape first all right and click on that you hit enter and then from here we can multi cut and I hold shift if I want to hit the center hold shift that's where that black dot comes up all right enter and then from here it's simple to just go ahead and move this out to the shape of your your home okay I mean your your cylinder you know what I'm saying all right and you want to make it as balanced as possible obviously so now from here you just delete these exactly weird all right delete delete all those so if I hit three mi keyboard beautiful wronging Hall what's really really good somebody say something Holt yes it is a whole one and then the cool thing is too is the fencing like if you need to fence this in it's really easy because it's an edge loop that's the whole idea that's that's why this one works so well and if you have Maya 2018 and you got the circularize tool you can go ahead and grab that and which one is that circular is - I have it all I my own tab so there we go circle and it adjusted it a little bit I'm gonna go ahead and just so I made the circle better but it didn't line it up exactly the way I want and I've got to turn off this edge constraint so I can go ahead and turn this a little bit move it down the circular eyes just kind of screw with it a little bit but but that now it's what that did is it's gonna make all of these edges the same length so that's nice so now I know it's gonna fit in there really well okay so that's the easy circle pipe and you change that new alright here we get a little bit harder one okay but this one has the advantage of the fact that it is in the center of all these squares but it is it is definitely a more challenging one so if you look here and we expand out you see how it's in the middle of all these squares that's gonna make life a little bit easier alright but how to do this well is a little bit unintuitive it seemed more intuitive after I do it but it's kind of like how do you figure that out well I don't know somebody showed me that's so I'm showing you all right how do you cut a hole here you know what I do what I do all right get your cut tool first thing you do is you just basically trace this circle and start cutting it into here now these are just curves by the way that I just laid down these spherical curves okay there's there's my first part second part delete out all these because we don't need them anymore delete it'll help us see our work better actually wait I'm sorry don't delete I'm on the next one my head's going to the next the next tutorial all right um actually so from here what our problem is is we need this this hole needs to be basically balanced out and with what we have is just a grid going through all right so what I'm gonna start to do is let me start going for my corners and just cutting into the middle here so I can even cut from the middle to these corners okay now when I get to like this next edge it's the same thing I'm just gonna cut here cut to there okay hit answer cut here and I did that the wrong way should start on the outside cut today okay ah two more we got to do this one and we got to do this one okay the reason why we don't have to do the middle once is because they already fit with the shape of the circle okay we don't have to we don't have to worry about the crosshair one okay all right so now that we've got that established we need to remove the edges that we don't need okay so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna take those original grid edges and get rid of that so that one that one and the way I can tell obviously is because it's the one that makes up the square and the only ones we leave are the middle ones again so we don't mess with the middle ones ctrl backspace we get rid of those right and now now that I have that all gone I can delete these faces in the middle so I can see my work better okay and what we want to do is we can go ahead and start collapsing edges so we can grab this edge and this edge flaps so these are just this is just cleanup so I just hit GM a keyboard to repeat this one there we go okay but it doesn't look perfect yet so all we have to do now is just take these and move them back out and if you want you can turn your edge constraint it'll slide nice and cozy right towards the first mark that you made okay this is a 16 sided hole which is fine as long as it's balanced out oK you've got 20 18 might as well go ahead and do it even better by hitting your circularize tool and you can see it didn't really even move that much which means I was pretty close just doing it by hand and you could just slide this over a little bit slide it up a little bit okay that's a pretty easy cut too even though it seemed a little complicated that was not that hard because it's isolated within those boxes alright so then the next thing comes up is what do you do when it's hard when it's not the way you want it when the the right way to cut it is in the middle of all these places like let's say you're working and somebody gives you a diagram they say we need it to look like this you could say oh well I'll just move this thing I'll just come here and I'll just I'll just move it over a little bit so it's within these okay well what if that doesn't actually look the best right you're trying to go for what looks best and you're trying to do it right so you need to learn how this is done all right this is the same way okay we did it before we're just cut and cut but this one's a little bit different this one we're actually gonna read to apologize briefly or I should say read we're in it we're gonna change the edge flow and we're gonna put a fence in to hold everything together alright the fence will protect you that sounds like a line out of a terrible like you know dictatorship movie or something the fence will protect you or some kind of cult movie or something all right so we got that this is a case where you will want to delete your Center so you can see it because we're not gonna be cutting into the middle like we did before alright let's get in close here got a little in there and he's gotta go - yeah delete those okay looks terrible right for now for now it'll get better I promise I promise okay so let's let's put our fence in and what we're gonna do it's like we're kind of just following the same circle we're going from the outside so this is I'm not gonna tell you this is the most difficult situation you'll ever meet and modeling but this is it this is a challenging situation you're like you're told it needs to look like this and it would be so much easier to do it you know a cheapo way and just kind of remove the circle but you know that you can't you know you really shouldn't do that you got to do it the right way okay so we've got that in there but we've got a whole bunch problems all right so how do we fix those problems well the first thing we're going to do is we're gonna go to our edges and we're gonna start collapsing and making a circle with our outside edge all right so anywhere you see this this crazy goofiness right here we're gonna start collapsing that okay and collapse that flaps that that so I'm just hitting G again just repeating my tool and I believe this one's gotta be collapsed too okay so now that we've got this now I'm gonna show you the way the way you would do this with the circularize tool is super easy you could just grab all these birds hit circularize it's gonna work but and of course all of you guys will have that option from from the moment you get 2018 but the old-school way to fix this now like it the circle obviously doesn't look great but the old-school way to fix it is again pop so you can count your edges and look at that ten edges and what do I have here I have the end of us of a cylinder and I just made the cylinder ten edges and I all I have to do is bring this in here move it where the circle is supposed to be like have it hit the edges of the circle and now I can go ahead and snap these verts to there so I can balance this out and this is kind of a few step process you're not it's not like you just cut once and you're done all right I am showing you guys the manual hard stuff you may not run into this all the time but this is how you did take care of this so if you do run into it you guys would be like hey you know I can handle that all right so I'm snapping all these it's gonna make a nice balanced and looks like I missed one there backspace so if you just want to get rid of a vert you just selected hit backspace I can target well this two here target well bat to there okay so the reason for the fencing was because it's the fencing in this case has got to protect the circle it's gonna protect the shape of the circle all right there I have another problem here though I've got two triangles right here so one here one there how do I get rid of these it's so easy that if you if I didn't show you you probably did I mean it's just so ridiculous when I show you you're like oh that's so easy you just cut outside hit enter backspace that's it you just basically you just re did your political flow just a little bit you don't want to do too much now this circle out here doesn't look great but what you're gonna do is you're gonna basically just grab these verts you're gonna eyeball and look in like this now let's say this is on the side of a cylinder and you had to do some funky cut remember I don't you guys watch the video but you want to keep your original like a copy of your original cylinder smooth out so that you can take that cylinder and you can snap these to the surface in case it gets miss shaped in case your cylinder starts losing its its good shape okay so now we've got that if I want to get even more specific here I can grab some more of these let's go like this that actually I'm not gonna grab that one just these just the outer ones okay watch this I'm just gonna do an average verts on it and what that does and I'll just turn it up you can barely tell what it did but let me just show you this so if I undo it it just it's I did it pretty balanced already so you don't see much movement but what it does is it just balances the verts out with each other and tries to make quads okay why would this be important why is it important to have like even balance topology other than rendering can anybody else think of another reason go ahead exactly that's exactly why because you you can if your stuff is well done your topology as well then it can be passed down and animated correctly if your topology is like all unbalanced and uneven and weird stuff here and there it might you can make it render right there's no doubt but if you were to pass it on if this thing needs to be animated it's not going to necessarily look good when it's animated because it's just not going to deform well alright so you can see right here I have a smooth version this is the exact same thing that I did hear that all right and if I went ahead and smooth this you can see now this this fencing area protects the inner circle that sounds even more like a cult defense will protect the inner circle okay how much time we got we got almost little time so I'm gonna go right to the text okay I'm gonna skip this one that's just another example um okay he's able to use the text tool yes one okay super cool super easy to use go you're poly tools you get pics hit the text tool you want to go to type let me hit F on my keyboard so you see this right here it comes up like this by default all right and I can change this you know I'm gonna put in DT okay and I'm going to change it to oh I don't know wild style no not lasso actually this is really cool look at this you guys have all seen Patrick papyrus it's really cool it actually does that really well um that's terrible alright let me just go back to my other because I had it font that I liked okay so so anyway you can play around with that there's all kinds of cool stuff like that you could actually even play with the profile so look how mine is like kind of got this curve profile that's way off in one of these connected things here there's like a whole bunch of them anyway uh you know what maybe we'll just wait in the textual yeah because it's almost over well wait I'll show you some more about the tax thing one of your assignments I'll actually tell you what a video the text part because part of your assignment is you're gonna take your initials just to you don't have to do three like first-name lastname everyone's got a first name in the last name right are you just you're just called Oprah print right print see he's got a cymbal right sure I like that too that's good so one of the assignments here to get is to take text and to process it so it can be animated correctly like you were in motion graphics okay I do a video flap though so you guys will have that on up on my website and then you guys can do the assignment off of that alright

Channel: 3D Trip

Views: 2,493

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Maya, Edge Flow, Topology, Modeling

Id: h-0RVIggIRQ

Length: 40min 48sec (2448 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018