Essential Skills to Become a PRO - How to Learn Topology

hello and welcome to gabot media i'm grant abbott and in today's video we're looking at how to learn topology so are you fed up with your models looking messy having bad structure and being awkward to model then you need to start practicing and learning better topology skills this video will show you a few useful resources to help you make that happen so topology is the fundamental building blocks of any model if you want to make that jump from beginner or intermediate to an advanced modeler you must have an understanding of good topology so first of all there's a few resources on this channel that will help you get good at topology if we go across to the playlist section in there you'll be able to find my get good at blender 2.8 playlist that's got some basic practice exercises which is about general modeling skills and then builds up to understand topology flow in later videos along with that i've also got a retopology playlist and i'll be referring to this video retopology a detailed guide what is retopology and why do we need it a few times within this video so definitely take a look at that one so now i'll show you a few resources where i learned a lot of my topology knowledge first of all sketch fab it's a good site where you can actually sell your models as well as look at other people's models so let's take a look at this fun dinosaur here the great thing about sketchfab is that you can click on this model inspector here and then go across the wireframe option here and let's choose a blue outline and we can see the topology i can then left-click and move around and analyze the topology and figure out what's going on you can see that this is a quad-based mesh and you can see some of the topology flow and how for example if i pause this you can see that around the legs we've got a nice even flow there but it changes when it gets to this point here and that's what's called a pole see my other videos for more information on that but you can see how the topology flows in different directions when it hits one of these poles and they're crucial to understanding topology so we can easily analyze and look at these models to influence our own understanding of topology let's quickly take a look at another one here's a great looking model let's maximize that and analyze it as well quickly put on the wireframe and see what's going on now this might look like it's not a quad based mesh but that's only because it's been triangulated for use in game engines and things like that because everything gets converted to triangles in the end so don't get confused when you see a mesh like this and assume they're a bad model or something strange like that like i say it's just been triangulated so you can actually see the quad-based mesh going through here but each of the quads is then split into a triangle and you can see some of the detail there and this is great for learning how other artists treat and deal with topology issues for example the edge flow around the shoulders here and how the quads move and adapt to the shape and you can see there's a pole there which changes our topology flow this is also very useful for thinking about how high or low poly you need to go with your models i would say for a game model this is fairly high poly so you'd see this in a pc or console game but not a mobile game but it's still very low poly so it fits within that threshold that you have for games which generally is getting quite high these days but you'll notice as well there's no wasted topology no extra faces that we don't need so it's really useful to be able to look at models like this and analyze them in this way incidentally you can also see things like the metalness maps and roughness maps to learn more about those so hopefully you've looked at my retopology a detailed guide video and you understand that good topology tends to be in quads quads are much easier to model with cut through add extra loops they work well with subdivision surfaces and so on but we don't always have to model in quads and it does depend on the model and what it's going to be used for take this model for example big bad boss it's a lovely low poly model looks really great let's have a look at the model inspector and see what's going on with the topology so we can see it's really low poly this one suitable for a mobile game but it's not actually all in quads if we look at things like the back of the legs here and the arm actually kind of intersects the body here which seems strange but it works really well you've even got triangles around the eyes so with low poly modelling like this the most important things are to keep the silhouette from all angles so that's the outline that you can see here you can see when i go round it keeps its shape all the time so that silhouette the outline as we call it so it's just the right amount of topology take this jacket for example if i look from the base here it's got a nice curve to it but at no point do we lose that silhouette so if there wasn't this cut down here you might have an even lower poly version and a big face across here would seem more of a kink in that jacket and more of a flat shape going across here so this is just the right amount of polygons and it's really kind of optimal notice as well we haven't got the inside of the jacket that just cuts off in here and joins to the trousers at the bottom here the collar is also interesting how it sort of overlaps just on this bit but then joins up to the rest of the jacket up here so keeping the integrity of the silhouette whilst also keeping the polygons down not only that we need to also think about animation so like i referred to earlier in the knees here we've got these triangles at the back and an extra cut at the front here to help the animation and that should deform really nicely and animate well so topology isn't only about making the shape look good it's also about how it animates so it's a good idea to look for examples of low poly characters that are animated as well and again you can see my retopology detail guide for more information on animation with topology now another great resource that i've used before is the polycount wiki i'll put a link in the description now this is quite old but it's still really really useful it's got examples of topology so let's go to body topology for example and you can see it's got lots of guides pictures for you with really detailed in-depth information mainly focusing on the body but if we scroll down a bit as well we've got some great topology examples here some of these links don't work anymore because it's quite old but take a look through each of them because the ones that are still there are really useful also it's got this section on principles of topology and it's got some really useful information there nice and simple but it defines each of these things that are worth looking up and there's poles which i've been talking about earlier there's even a low poly thread on the polycount forum which is a great forum where we're taking a look at which is still relatively active today and you can post your models and maybe get a bit of feedback and ask questions about topology so that's my guide for getting better at topology so a few resources on my channel we've got sketchfab to really analyze and look at other people's models and we've got the polycount wiki and forum for looking at really detailed in-depth guides and examples which we can learn from there so thanks for watching and i hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 172,138

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, get good at blender, get better at blender, get better at 3d modelling, 3d modelling skills, 3d modelling, 3d modeling, blender tutorial, topology, faces

Id: xo9JRPhGi68

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021