Frequently Asked Questions on Topology

hello in this video i'm going to answer some common questions about topology why are triangles bad why are end guns bad why should we have good topology why does it matter so if you guys want to help me out if anyone ever asks questions about why ngons are better triangles please link them to this video right here and it will answer a lot of their questions the first thing to get out of the way is that on my channel i'm mostly geared towards cinematic film assets so i do work on video games sometimes and 3d printing but that's more rare usually i'm making assets for films and for animation that's why i care a lot about topology because for me it's not just about video games or 3d printing i really want the nice clean meshes for animation and for that i want things to be all quads as much as i can and as clean and simple as i can that works very well for films it just it reduces polygon accounts it allows for easy subdivision i can keep on subdividing so if i'm far away i can have you know one level if i'm closer i can have two levels even closer i can go over three or four or even more so that's very powerful workflow right there where you can just dynamically change subdivision according to how close the camera is so the important thing to understand about 3d is that there's many applications if you guys want to work on video games topology is not as important to you because you know most video games use triangulated assets when you import this into a game engine it will triangulate anyways if you're working on 3d printing then also topology doesn't matter because you're using a cad nurbs program for example if somebody wanted me to model a case for a cell phone i wouldn't even use 3ds max or blender i would use multi 3d or fusion 360 because those programs work a lot better for small accurate precise details so that's number one thing guys my channel is mostly about design and film assets that's why i care about topology because these things going to be seen in films we want the topology to be simple and clean so if you are working with polygons why should you avoid triangles and n-gons well you can see on this option just turn off turbosmooth you can see that the right side is all quads except for the center now why is that that's because the object itself is a triangular object so in order for me to get rid of this triangle it will be kind of pointless because i would just need to have a loop going through let's say you know have a cut going through here and so the only purpose for this cut is to just have this be a quad in this situation having a triangle is fine because that's just the kind of shape that we're using here it's just a triangular shape so having a loop going through here and all the way through your mesh just to have this be a quad is kind of pointless and it's just going to add extra density here so in this situation a triangle is perfectly fine because that's just the shape of things here however everything else here is still a quad however on the left side you can see the topology is a lot messier we have triangles we have an n gone and so when we subdivide using open subdivide turbo smooth i'm using three levels you can see we're getting a lot more distortion on the left notice for example on the top the right is looking very straight here whereas the left has this kind of bend to it see that and depending on the complex and smoother object you will see this even more this object is a little bit more basic but you can definitely see there's distortion happening look on the left side here notice how on the right it's very straight and clean here on the left we have this kind of lopsidedness happening here this is what bad topology gives us even though without subdivision it looks perfectly straight here with bad topology you get also distortions when you subdivide so if you're making the film assets it's really a good idea to use quads and minimize triangles or n-gons of course sometimes you can still have them and sometimes it doesn't really matter but most situations the rule of thumb is to just have all quads and only have triangles when you really can't help it so let me just give another example with a plane let's say i've got that and i can just begin to model some things here all right so i've got that i'm going to divide this as you can see this would be a good film mesh because it's perfectly it's simple in fact you can even remove these loops as well but let's keep them for now and so you can see you get a very nice smooth result however on the new outer plate modifier let's start to add some triangles here and you can see we're starting to get distortions especially when you have reflections happening and at certain angles you can see maybe from here you can even see this distortion happening here of course through a very complex dense mesh these will be less noticeable but that's why i gave you a simple example definitely see distortions happening here and then if you add things like and guns then you get all sorts of really disastrous things really obvious things happening here really heavy distortions so these are just the basics of why we want to stick with quads and avoid triangles or n-guns however in some situations they're going to actually help you from a design sense so for example let me just redo what i did here let's say for example that i remove that and let's say for example i will connect these vertices and maybe this right here you can see now i've turned objects into an angon so i can redesign them and then i can just have some really nice freeform shapes happening here so notice how now i've got this happening and i can put a little more work into it i can for example use creasing so sometimes as i am modeling i will actually use n-gons sometimes for example i'm modeling things all right and i'm thinking okay i want to quickly close this up so what i would do is just for example bridge this go into the border level and just cap this so you see we do have an n gone here but to quickly close this up i can do that and then i can work out the topology by doing cuts for example all right and for example i can simplify this by using target weld so we just kind of dynamically quickly simplify things so you got a triangle here an n gone here but for now it's not too bad because it's important to realize when you see me having n gone to triangles it means that i'm working at a design level so i'm not necessarily getting this ready for a film asset i'm just designing things very quickly so i will leave n gones and triangles just because i don't care about them right now i just want to design the object i can fix them later if this is approved to be a film asset so there's no point going around here and fixing things if you don't even know if you're happy with this as a design for the design aspect if you didn't like this and you want to listen to movie then you couldn't go in here and fix things up and make things a lot nicer and cleaner and with good topology all right so it's important to realize it's not just about having all quads it's also about minimizing how many vertices you have with three edges or five or six or more edges you can see for example right here when i have one iteration looks kind of bad here two durations looks bad three looks bad four looks bad five still looks bad if you're zoomed in very closely the reason for this is because of a vertex with one two three four five six seven eight edges connected to it so it's not just about having all quads it's about having your vertices have only four edges another example of this let's say i create another plane so model's designer when you export from it it has an option to give you triangles or quads and you may think that quads are the better option but the quads will have lots of vertices with three or five or six edges connected to it and that's actually worse than triangles because if you have triangles you can go in and remesh it in for example zbrush or using reed topology so if you're going to export from wireless designer it's a good idea to actually just leave it as triangles to give an example of that in 3ds max here if i have this let's say this is supposed to represent a cloth object so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to just select everything and then connect get this and then let's say turbo smooth and then say do some quick cloth simulation on this all right let's say something like that now you can see we have all quads here everything is a quad but the problem is that you have these vertices with lots of edges connecting to it or vertices with three edges so i'm going to move this off to the side and this one i'm going to re-apologize with 500 face count all right and let me just collapse that so which one do you think will have better subdivision results this one or this one well if i subdivide them both to roosevelt you can see the one on the left has a lot of strange deformations happening here and you can see what's causing that it's those vertices with three edges or five or six edges you know if you look right here for example you can see this distortion happening here and that's caused by three edges this thing is happening here caused by the three edges now this mesh on the right looks a lot smoother here because the reet's apologies give us much better results and if i want even better results i can apply your topology again and notice how another topology modifier will even improve things further because look at how these look at how the topology looks without the second one see we have three edges here and five inches but notice what it looks like afterwards nice quads with four edges so that's why it's a good idea to apply a second multipunch modifier to improve things even more notice how it makes bottom left improves that as well because for cloth we want things to be as simple as we can unless of course we want to go in here and to add some seams or further modeling so if we take a look at this object what i did here was i just started with a basic cylinder all right then i went into the poly and i simply removed these edges then i went in here and inserted two loops then i extrude like this and what i did is i also just insert a loop through here and to the bottom as well then i went into vertex paint and also we can do a quick unwrap as well on our uw ctrl a one uv editor mapping and then flatten mapping then i applied vertex paint let's turn it on all right let's make it pure black and let's fill that in then i'm going to select these vertices and then i'm going to shrink i'm going to change this to white i'm going to fill that in with white giving us this change back to the regular view the purpose for this is that now i can use that vertex pin as a mask for applying some sort of displacement to the top of this and of course i also sharpen up these objects these edges by doing a little bit of crease here and then open subdiv 0 in the viewport and then 3 or more at render time so guys notice how simple this object is it's less than 100 polygons yet at render time we get this as you can see i'm able to easily apply displacement so this is one of the primary reasons why i work with polygons and film assets is because i can have this very simple object in the viewport it's very easy to work with it's very easy to further modify it's very easy to unwrap this have special effects it's very low polygon counts but at render time you get this very smooth very detailed object right here and if you ask yourself what if you did not use this method what if you export this from a cad program you know when it's a fusion 360 digital operation here beveled filtered all these edges you would get a highly triangulated object with hundreds thousands of little triangles here that would then be clogging up your scene let's say that you use boolean with polygons for example in blender you're just pulling this away once again you have a very dense messy topology mesh zbrush same situation but because you take advantage of all the tools here with polygons and the simplicity and displacement mapping you can have a very simple object here and it's much more complex another time once you add this displacement detail so you see how i'm able to get lots of small little details while still keeping the mesh super simple here very easy to edit very used to modify and animate and rig and everything else thank you for watching and take care you

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 18,651

Keywords: arrimus, tutorial, topology, 3d, 3ds, max, model, modeling, faq, frequently, asked, questions, answers, design, detail, fast, easy, simple, how to, beginner, start, noob, b3d, blender, displace, displacement, pro, top, tip, mesh, poly, polygon, subd, subdivision

Id: f0OWJnCGCSc

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021