Five Topology Tips Every 3D Artist Should Know

one of the First videos on my channel was a guide to good topology specifically how to maintain good quad topology when you're increasing or decreasing the number of edges on a Model that video was ridiculously popular and I've had tons of requests over the years to make a follow-up video so here it is this is five of my favorite methods for maintaining good topology when you're making 3D models I'm using blender for this demo but pretty much everything I'm going to say is applicable to any other 3D modeling package before we begin I want to take a minute to talk about the sponsor of this video private internet access we'll know that the internet is a very big place with millions of websites that we can access and tons of content online but what you might not know is that the content that's actually Available to You largely depends on where you live streaming services for instance have entirely different libraries for each country and some websites are completely unavailable in certain 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a sphere and you want to cut a shape into the front or not much cut but extrude the shape into the front then you would just do something like this you would extrude it in you could add a subdivision modifier and it all goes a little bit too curved to think to yourself oh well what I'll do is I'll add some supporting Loops right because if you put a loop next to another Edge I'll tighten that surface up so you add in these loops and you bring it in like this like this like that and maybe you put one around here and you think that looks pretty good and then you've got an object View and you see that you have these horrible crease marks we can fix that really easily there's two main ways of doing that but you don't want to use supporting edges that go all the way around like this because it will just cause pinching and it'll cause problems so the first way that you can do this if you really want to use supporting edges what I would suggest you do instead is use the knife tool find a nearby vert bring it across something like this and just manually cut in onto the surface and if we look at this in object mode we have none of that weird pinching that we had before but we still get the nice hard line the other thing that you can do and this is probably my preferred method if I'm working on something like this is to select around the edges and use creasing instead subdivision surface modifiers basically work by adding new faces in between the original faces are there and then it averages out the position of all the faces based on the closest neighbors so when you use creasing all that you really do is you change how much that's going to get averaged out by so if we select all of these and we use shift in E to add crease you can see that the the line's got pink and if we enable the subsurface again we can see we've got these nice hard lines and we don't have any other weird pinching or issues that we had before and the best thing about creases you can always go back and press shift and E again and you can reduce the amount of crease so you get exact control over the whole thing at once so that's all well and good if you're wanting to just extrude in and out of faces that already exist but what if you wanted to say Boolean cut on a curved surface well I guess there's some new problems let's just add a sphere here and shade it smooth and then let's say we're going to cut out a cylinder which is quite a common thing to do what a lot of people will do is they'll think oh well I want a nice smooth cut so they'll really ramp up these numbers to something like 42. and then we'll rotate this I have the build tool enabled which is just an add-on that comes with blender and it makes it easier to Boolean things with just a shortcut so I'm going to select both of these and I am going to press Ctrl minus and that'll cut that out and you can see the problems that we're getting here we get these weird glitches right and if I make this smaller the glitches will probably get even worse yeah so the reason why we're getting these glitches if I apply this we'll see because I used a very dense mesh there especially we have all of these new edges that have been added for each one of these verts that's what's causing the problems a face has to be flat and when you're cutting out a shape on a curved surface you're now making these faces not flat anymore we can fix this quite easily if we go to options and auto merge what we can do is just find all of the misses and we can double tap G and just slide them into the nearest neighbor and you can see there how that fixes this problem and if we just go around most of the near misses that should fix most of the issues now the reason I think density is so important for this is because if we used a a cylinder that didn't have as many edges right if we use the cylinder that was let's say um 24 and we do the same thing now we have a lot less to clean up in fact this is that's clean right off the bonds pretty much there's one or two errors that would have to go in and fix but it's much less work and it's a lot it's going to give you much nicer results the next tip that I want to talk about is making tape joints it's really common in a lot of objects to have two metal cylinders or something like that onto a railing or a handle where you'll have a 90 degree connection between two different curved objects so let's just add a cylinder into the scene again um yeah 24 should be fine and I'm going to make this about four times longer and apply the scale and then the the first method that everybody learns the thing that most people do is they'll just use the knife tool Right add it Edge in the middle here and we'll press k for the knife tool then if you press C it will cut all the way through the mesh and you can press a for 45 to cut at a 45 degree angle right so let's just mirror this so we don't have to do the everything twice I have mirror setup as a shortcut here so then you can just select all of these faces that we just made and you can extrude them up and now we have a cylinder but sometimes this causes really weird shading glitches like this where you get this line down the middle you also have to go through and you have to delete these faces and then you have to go through and you have to delete these faces and there's a lot of cleanup work to do but ultimately you still end up with this weird kind of glitchy looking thing so we can uh we can do this better basically and the way that I prefer to do this is to just grab a cylinder it says four game and we can actually just use a Boolean cut if I duplicate this I rotate it around to make a t-joint and a select both of them and I press Ctrl and add the bowl cutter tool will add these two together and because they're the same size you actually get really nice topology and then I can just apply that and get rid of the uh the joining object and you can see that we've got pretty good topology and if we share this we don't get the weird line and if we want to make it just a single joint like we had last time we just need to get rid of these verts select these ones and press scale X zero and because I've got Auto merge on these will merge together straight away and now we have a really nice looking joint and then what we can also do is just grab these edges here we can bevel them a little bit we can get a nice smooth kind of like a weld look like two pieces have been welded together so I think that's a much better way to make these sorts of joints I think this is a really important tool to have in your belt if you're doing a lot of 3D modeling because this shape appears all the time okay so next up let's talk about a radial topology a lot of times when people try to model something radially it's really off-putting because you have to either do the same thing over and over again or you model one small section of of the object and then you rotate it around and duplicate it but that's kind of awkward because then you have to know the exact scale that you want to model to or people only use a Boolean and that causes all sorts of problems with topology so what I prefer to do to keep the topology really nice is I'll just add in a plain rotate it 90 degrees and apply the rotation then I'll add an array modifier and I will add a simple deform if we set that to bend at 360 degrees on the Zed what that will do if we up the count on the array it'll just keep continuing the same thing around again again so now if we went in and we tried to do something like um I don't know like a revolver right on a on a revolver you get this kind of design way you have something like this Maybe this would come down a bit bevel that and you've got something like this on the Chamber of a revolver we can press merge as well to merge all of the array together screw that down and then move that in and you can see that we have these very visible seams in between and that's really easy to fix as well all you have to do is just move a supporting Edge near there or a few supporting edges and you can also add um a subdivision surface modifier remove this to the top change that to simple then we can shade smooth this and we get this really nice topology at all quads and you can just keep modeling on run a radial manner which is basically procedural and the best thing about it is you can always just change the radial count as well which is something you can't really do if you're modeling any other way like this the final tip that I want to talk about today is about cylinders cylinders are quite hard to work with with next topology sometimes because when you generate cylinder among other things the top is either a triangle fan which is a lot of tries going into the middle like this or it's one big and gone and the problem is if we add a subdivision surface modifier to this we get an absolute mess we can try and clean this up a little bit we can add some supporting edges to the top we can select this and inset it a little bit and you can see that even once we shade smooth we have obvious pinching around the edges this is no good but we can do much better than this we can make a cylinder that is actually all quads and won't have this problem so I'm just going to delete that and I'm going to make a new cylinder and this is just going to be eight verts and then I'm going to add a supporting loop around the top I'm going to select this first and we're going to inset and add one on the top side and we're going to insert again delete this I'm going to select the edge Loop that we've just made and we're going to use grid fill which you can also access as instead of just searching for it you can access I believe it up in face grid fill so now you can see that we've got all quads this face has four sides it's a quad so does this one so does this one all of it is quads and if we add a subdivision surface modified to this with three levels which is what we use for the last one um we should smooth it you can see that we get a much cleaner effect compared to the last one it also has much much less topology because I only used eight sides to start off with I really hope you found this video helpful if you'd like to see more videos on topology please let me know in the comments I'm sure you will I still get so many comments on the last topology video asking for stuff like this remember to give a like And subscribe to this video if you did find it helpful and thank you very much to private internet access for sponsoring this video thank you [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: DECODED

Views: 240,015

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, vfx artist, topology, blender topology, how to topology, topology tips

Id: m8JkR6tI_q4

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023