Full Guide to GAME READY Topology in Blender!

when making low poly characters having better topology can really improve your character and you'll have a less hassle later on when working with like rigging and animation and even when just modeling parts of your character so I put together this card will'll take you like through everything you need to know about making topology for game characters first let's cover the basics of character topology Okay cool so here is the topology guard so firstly this is a bad example of when you're making your shoulders you don't want to do this basically you see here this is kind of bad it's possible but it's generally quite bad you might get some pretty bad results with it and let me explain why you can see here I have a lot of different like topology and like the guards and all of this and you'll see a lot of this with higher poly characters but with lower poly you don't really have like too much of this so I'm going to break down like how you actually need to do a character so firstly let's look at this top image okay so the most important part about this is like seeing where they put their loops and where we can like take this over to low poly is in specifically having loops around parts that bend and this will be your legs so where they join with the body your shoulders where they join the body and your neck as well so you can see here they have the neck Loop they have the arm Loop um and they don't like actually outline this but you can see they have a leg Loop that goes around like that so the reason you want to do this is that when you're bending those arms and the legs and the neck you don't get any weird defamation cuz if you don't have a proper Loop going around it won't really bend that well now as you saw my like don't do this example above why shouldn't you do it like that so firstly having your character's arms be all the way down is quite bad and the reason for this is because if you imagine your character and the range of motion for the arms if you look at it so if you put your shoulder here you range your motion if you actually raise your arms and don't raise your shoulders at all you can see it's kind of slightly above above your shoulder line and then down to like this now you can see we have to get this whole range and now our position is over here the optimal is to get it in the middle of this so if we take it here the optimal is going here or probably slightly higher but yeah you know what I mean you trying to get the middle so a lot of people will do T pose and that's kind of standard and that's kind of just for like rigging and stuff people say do a t pose which is kind of unnatural if you're trying to make a goodl looking character so I recommend doing an A Pose this just helps so much because the thing is if you make your topology and it's for your arm being all the way down then now when you bend your arm all the way up then you're going to have lots of issues underneath now the same thing applies for if you're doing a t pose like your arm is going directly out then if you don't add enough topology on the shoulder which is especially important when you're making a low poly character you like probably won't add enough topology when you bend it all the way down then if you have like two faces then now that two faces have to supply all of the topology for the shoulder so that's why I recommend having a AOS character it's just cuz it's in the middle and you'll get the best like bang for buck of topology and you can actually design it and have control over what looks nice and have to like worry about when posing if will look nice or not okay so if we go back to my over here the like the thing is this is done quite well with their T POS cuz you can see over here they have these two loops on their their shoulder and the reason they've done this is basically so that when they like bend the arm down they have a lot of topology there so you can see here on the bottom they have two faces like that there two Loops but then up they go one two like three four five six so they have so many faces up there and that's basically just to one give the shape of the shoulder and when you bring down the arm you won't get as many problems but this is a lot harder to do on low poly so that's why I recommend doing the AP POS this can only work if you can get this like extra Loop going like that and then you can have those two so that just helps Aid the process of like generating as much topology on that shoulder as possible U because that's what you kind of need when bending your arm down now you can see the other things like having loops on your arm which I'll go into later how to do your joint and stuff but there is a better way of doing this for low poly because you don't really have enough topology going along your arm to get this Loop and again it's just to get enough topology on that elbow cuz the thing is when you bend your elbow like the same thing applies so your arm is normally straight so then the thing is when you bend it like halfway or even further you need to have a lot of topology on that elbow to get it to actually look nice and also there's two ways to approach your topology so either like uh like this like this one or these two so it's having like the topology for making a goodlook topology and having good defamations or having just following the muscle so you can see here a lot of these it'll look nice like this so you can see it has all the muscles um like this which is one Higher poly so it'll take more poly for your game engine um and then you may or may not get better deformation cuz actually following the proper muscles So in theory it's better um but it's longer to do um it doesn't have clean topology so if you need to adap this to like clothing or anything you're going to have a nightmare with that um so yeah it's up to you but generally you kind of want to stick with the more clean topology but then you can kind of push it more to this middle one where they still have all the muscles and stuff but they kind of like still keep it with the clean like flow of it so you can see in this rat example the with yellow one you can see it kind of of like has little triangles and intersection and stuff like that whereas with this middle one you can see it still has a good flow down the side like that um and then a good horizontal like flow like that so it doesn't really break that um so you can kind of that's like the middle point but yeah it's kind of up to you whether you want to go for the aesthetically pleasing uh look on your muscles or topology but yeah something that's very useful is just look up topology cards like this you can find like ones for low poly characters want get like anotated ones like this just find like low poly characters that deform really well um and then you can find the high poly ones and kind of break it down to see will this work for low poly or will it not cuz you can see something this Loop over here on the back this will not work on a low poly character cuz you don't have enough polyes to get that um like at most you will get like a a specific one that goes like that but it's quite hard and not really that necessary uh you you can set because they're basically just trying to get extra Loops there and the easy way of doing that is just adding like an extra like piece you just just do like this um kind of just generate there's an easy way of generating extra topology which is basically like if you have two vertices like that um you just go make it a square like this well it's square but you know what I mean um there and then extrude that out so there and now you've got like four vertices instead of two um and then you can kind of just generate more topology like that and I'll help on uh there cuz same thing as before your leg is going to be straight by normal and then going to raise later on so you're going to need to have a lot of topology on over here and over here moving on to joints so in the beginning you know that I mentioned having like a good amount of like like topology on the like shoulder on the uh where the legs join the body and the same thing for the neck and the reason for this is basically so that when you bend again to have enough topology so the way this works in like low poly is something like this which is a character I made so you can see I have I just literally just add that extra Loop just to make it that much better when doing it um now I don't even have that much topology to like on those joints um like you can see even here they've done a bit more than me uh so one not that many because they have all the topology above but you see just adding this extra two um cuz the thing is if you compare the position cuz it has a sort of like down and then out so the thing is if that wasn't there then it would actually look like like that so it would cut away so much volume of the leg so just adding that extra Loop can do a lot so yeah so just find like some good ones experiment it depends on how you want your character to look uh because you can have like stuff specific to like low poly you can have ones with like a bunch of triangles so it depends on if you want to add triangles you can see there um this is for the elbow I'd say maybe even weird having three but this is basically like depending on if you want to keep the volume of your um arm when it bends you can see here um they're just trying to get this on the right like in the middle so when you bend your arm it still has the elbow like Point like that so you're sort of losing volume on the forearm as well um but it still keeps that nice sharp Bend for the elbow um and then what they're trying to prevent is having the collapse in the arm so you can see here specifically this one in over here so you can see yeah when it like by default this is what's going to happen it's going to kind of like do that and that's just cuz it's kind of like conflicting vertex groups um so when you bend the arm it kind of goes in which is not as natural um so there's other there's like different ways of doing it either you can do it with just adding more edges which doesn't fix it that well but it does it a bit better um so yeah it's kind of just stuff like that so it's kind of up to you on what you're fun with cuz you get stuff like this where the default will look like this um which is a bit better than if you only have one verticy so if you only have like this piece and then it goes up to there kind of thing um it looks a lot better than if you had that but it also if you want you can do it this way with add a little triangle and then that face so when you bring the leg down it doesn't like collapse in on itself um if you know what I mean that kind of just the Little Triangle collapsing part um it's kind of up to you uh a lot of topology will kind of be up to you you kind of just have to decide what you like and what works and they kind of stick with that um cuz topology it won't make a good character but without it it can break a character so especially when animating and all that so you kind of want to get something that works and something that you can just do consistently so it's just a template so you don't have to worry about it later on it's cool so here is a like a better example of it so you can see here it has the there it goes out like this and then you have here when it goes in it collapses with that little bump which some people don't like some people will be fine with it it's like up to you but then you also have this upper one which they have there the square and the triangle and you can see when it bends it doesn't have that like loss of volume and that bit like collapse in on itself so yeah again up to you um just find what you like the most another example is for the Fingers um cuz you can see here your fingers should not look like this so to keep that volume again add more topology add more edges and then you can add these tricks if you want to keep it like not from like breaking down um so you can see here they just added a triangle in there just to get an extra one so this is basically saying um kind of similar to what I said before so basically you have two vertices and then you kind of do that and then you do that to get those extra vertices so now you got your three so you could do this it just this looks a lot better on your hands than if your like side of your hands did this but I mean it won't be that much worse so if you don't want to get triangles then kind of do it more like that on your joint which will probably look quite nice after we got the body and all the limbs then we need to add ahead and decide what level of detail do you want to add to it cool so with the phase it's kind of up to you basically being do you want to have a High detail face face or low detail face with your low body character so basically the the two different approaches you can go is something like these three over here or they're kind of two cuz it's just one image but that's the white frame of it so I guess there three so basically you can either say here with your face you kind of just don't worry about too much about the topology you kind of just need to me kind of a bad example cuz basically what you want is to have a loop around it um so you can actually get decent information um and then kind of just have it like go up follow like a jaw kind of thing um you can kind of like triangly maybe just there um just kind of get a good looking face with the topology just flowing up um and then kind of going around going across so kind of like a square grid pattern basically that's kind of one way of doing it um and you can see this kind of just like slightly different ways as you can see here they have more triangles and again like kind of like a loop going around the face like that um which is kind of something that'll show up in higher poly characters but just a very very low poly version of it you can see like they have a chin and then they kind of have a loop going around so this will go up and they kind of go over the head which is something that you'll see in a lot of higher poly faces so that's kind of the very low one you can either just have it go straight up what I usually do to make those is just you just like take a cube subdivide it uh maybe like bevet so there's like three across and that kind of thing um and then that's kind of what I base off of so I don't actually add that much and it's just kind of a sphere and you like drag down at the jaw kind of thing and make sure that you get a neck with these to poish so you can actually bend your neck um or you can go this kind of route where you actually still have the phasal features now you can get a very lower poly version of this which is like here with the loop going around kind of thing or you can like just base it off of this this is one from CG cookie which is very good and I love using this one so basically you can see they kind of give you a cheat sheet of the F Loop that you need in the face so you can see raccoon ass and Lids nose to Chin lips jawl so you can see the fifth one also just go one to two so this one around the eyes so this is basically like when you move your eyebrows and stuff that's kind of just very important and it also supports having the ey Loop so you need that one uh before you get the ey Loop so then you see then you get the ey Loop and that's kind of helped by that other loop so has kind of a supporting Loop to generate that cool then the third one the no Chin this is basically to help with the like the jaw and the muscles cuz you see like here you kind of if you look at your face you kind of see that it kind of flows around and then your jaw so you can kind of get decent deformation when you open and close your mouth okay and then from that as well again this helps cuz like you have this Loop going around and that helps generate the mouth Loop which you kind of just need a circle going around your mouth so you can actually move your mouth around go open and close whatever cool and then the last one that just like Loops it all is having this one and as you that was the same one that I could see on the low poly character um is just this whole thing to help with the jaw and just kind of encapsulate the whole piece of topology and make sure cuz like you can see all all this is kind of like very random Direction but it's kind of just to force it going like out this way so it's kind of just keeping it all going out and all going down kind of thing so you make basic it off of that um which is quite useful yeah so again it's subjective to you if you want to add the facial features this just helps um so you can kind of like this is a very nice like way of doing it uh you can see still has all those Loops um and you can kind of like simplify it down uh if you need to our character is looking good but having stumps to the end of your arms and your legs isn't great so let's go through how to make the feet and the hands next is the hands because this is something that can be like very easily messed up and yeah so basically there's kind of two different ways of doing it is depending on how many things you actually want on your character so a good example of this is this one so if we line up these five so you can see they're kind of the level of topology and they kind of use the same thing that I said earlier with the topology so you see they have two phases here and then they go there there so just the same but just at an edge in the middle so they went from two vertices to eight vertices so that's a well three vertices but it's two phases to four phases which is very useful so instead of having to add a bunch of like vertices going up and down your arm you can just joint like generate it here for the fingers so this is very useful if you want to do the four fingers cuz it's quite standard to have the like what's it like two over here so probably like eight eight vertices going down the arm or six vertices going down the arm yeah it's like six so that's kind of just a very easy way of getting those four fingers down um if you want to get the square fingers but you can also see another way of doing it is like here on the right where they have the same thing um they've done instead of doing this method over here of how they did the topology what they did is they did these little like triangle over here to get the the extra vertices and I think this might also be another triangle over here to get it um which I'm not sure about it but it kind of works but then you can see they've done these little triangles and that's basically just to say um instead of like you have your hand going out like this and then just just your fingers come out like that um instead what they've done they made it so that your hand goes out like this um and then they added those triangles like this to kind of get a diamond so it's basically just rotating it um which looks a lot nicter when you have those that square having it in a diamond shape makes it like look quite a lot nicer but it also will add a bit more topology uh but you can see so it's kind of up to you if you want it to look nice that way uh it depends on what you think looks nice to opinion um but yeah so generally this topology is going to improve and you can kind of decide if you want to use these like Knuckles and rotate it um and you can see here they don't really have any like things on the things so when you bend your fingers it's going to look a bit weird um so you can see here they've added these triangles just to make sure that it doesn't have the same bugs that we're talking about before now if you want to do this is like what I do a lot is the the missing hand or whatever um they already have three vertices of the Noir but they even had more topology than this one and it has four fingers but basically all this one is is just instead of having all the fingers done you can kind of just simplify down into a mitten um and you can either do it just us just a whole hand so I us do like like that so it's just one group like that or you can do it like this um they've added another verticy which isn't great but you can do the same thing as this one uh if you want to get the topology or just the triangle so kind of just going like if they have a two going like this then just triangle and then um if your finger going out and then this is kind of just to um like add a bit more like detail to this hand or you can literally just simplify it and take it down to like two vertices or two faces like this um which still looks quite nice and or you can even just keep them together as I said before so again it's up to you depending on what you look uh what you like the most um but that's kind of just the general couple different ways of doing it um and here just a couple extra examples um but these are all quite a bit more higher poly so yeah you see this is another one where they've done the exact same triangular thing and it looks quite nice so yeah okay something I done really mentioned before is use sketch Fab so basically the reason you use sketch Fab is you can take the model and you can break it down and see the like the mesh and the the wireframe of it which is very useful when you're doing it basically the reason this is useful is because when you have like nothing you can break it down so what I'm using currently is PF just chuck all the images in pf or truck them in like paint just Chuck them in Microsoft pain and start annotating over them so you can break it down and see what is actually good topology so this is in uh what's it this is in pf and PF basically just you can store a bunch of images on it which is really useful so I recommend using that so you can have bu that library of that like what is good to poy what you like yourself again with the feet it's quite simple and it's basically just what kind of thing do you like the most so you can see here you have like the the one toe kind of thing um and then they've done a triangles to generated which you don't actually need cuz I mean it would look fine if it just looked like this there was this straight line down down uh there so you can see there it would have worked completely if like that but there it all up to them and then you can also see um in the corner up here this is kind of just without the extra toe or like the the separation of the toe so again it's kind of how you like prefer but you generally what you want is like your your leg comes down and then you have a like a specific um Edge like that um or it's better showed off over here so you kind of come down with this Loop and then your topology goes down and then also kind of extrudes forward so you can see there um you kind of just getting the converting it from like going downwards like this into going forwards like this cuz that's what you need to kind of do the toes and uh the rest of the foot um but yeah so you can kind of just screenshot these break it down to what you like but especially when making low body character you can see it's just go down have that Loop and then just make sure that it flows forward from there you guys I know it's been a while but um back working on videos so let me know what you want out of the next couple videos if you have any specific requests or anything but yeah if you enjoy this video and found like everything useful then click over here I have a video all about weight painting and how it can like really mess up your topology and all of your bending and all of that stuff uh so watch that now cheers

Channel: Thomas Potter

Views: 21,712

Keywords: Blender, blender tutorial, b3d, topology, guide, tutorial

Id: VwNUMIrFCEA

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023