How to Master Topology and Edge Flow in 3D Modeling

hey everyone today we're going to cover re topology topology and edge flow and any 3d software i'll be using maya and quadra for this demo but the concepts and workflows discussed here can be applied to any 3d software i'll be showing you the do's and don'ts and how to apply these workflows into practice from my latest videos on topology if you found these videos helpful or have any of your own tips or want me to continue to cover topology in greater detail let me know down in the comments below as always a like and subscribe is always appreciated as i continue to grow the content of this channel so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya and you can see that i have this awesome looking dragon sculpt here that i started to do the retopologizing on using the modeling toolkit and quadra so i'm going to show you guys all everything about quadra here in just a moment but i did want to say a big thank you for richard bryce gore who gave me the sculpt model you can check out his work on art station and i pulled it from one of his daily sculpts that he did here right off the art station so we were talking about topology and i really wanted to kind of demo this on this cool looking model he also does some youtube videos and tutorials so make sure to check that out so now that we're back in maya you can see uh what i have here okay so the first thing i want to cover is just the tool quadra uh and everything you need to know about it so the key thing here right now is if you already know how to do quad draw go ahead and skip to the table of contents down below or to the next section and then we can start talking about topology but first let's go ahead and take a look at how to use quadra so i will go ahead and grab this dragon model i'll hit ctrl 1 to isolate and i'll go ahead and do what's called set live surface or make selected object live okay so with this dragon selected i'll go ahead and hit this magnet up top here and you can see that it went ahead and set this live surface now just to be sure how do we know if we go ahead and hit this edged uh or wireframe on shaded here you can see that it's green and that signifies that this is now a live service so you can no longer select it alright so if i go ahead and enable quad draw you can see now i can start i get a kind of a different looking cursor i'll go ahead and turn off the wireframe on shaded mode and begin plotting some points down now again you can get to that from the modeling toolkit and enabling quadra here now the way quadra works it's kind of in the name it's you draw quads all right so we're going to plot four points so as you can imagine each one of these points here that i'm left clicking is a vertice that equals up to a quad or a polygon all right so if i actually go ahead and turn off symmetry because i don't want to confuse anybody right now and we can do a clear dots down here on these settings so i'll go ahead and just do four one two three four just by left clicking and then you kind of hover on the inside here and hold shift and then left click once you're inside and it lets you know that once you're inside and you're holding shift it'll let you know this icon here or this highlighting effect that you you can click and create a quad there okay now once you've created the initial quad you can continue to plot points down and continue to create more uh polygons and quas here now obviously there's way more tools than just left clicking some vertices and points and creating a quad but so let's look into that all right now what i highly recommend is taking a look at some of these settings here now if i go ahead you can see there's auto weld here if i drag one of these points here closer to the other points it'll automatically snap and weld okay so you can change that setting by here and then you have kind of some other options which we'll look to in in a little bit here now if you accidentally create like a bunch of points and you you want to delete them you can hold ctrl shift and left click or if you want to clear everything you can simply hit clear dots now all the way at the bottom here you can see keyboard mouse and shortcuts so we'll quickly run through the majority of these here so we have left mouse button which is just simply creating the points here and then by holding shift on the inside that's going to create a new face now middle mouse button is going to move and manipulate your edges your faces and your points here okay just by simply holding middle mouse button so it's just a way to tweak and modify things now if you let's say hold ctrl and left click all right now you've gone ahead and added an edge that runs down here so what you could do is use uh control shift and start left clicking if you wanted to remove some edges or hold ctrl to left click and add edges so ctrl shift to delete and control to add so that's control shift left click and control left click all right so you have those there now another cool thing that you can do is use tab now tab just allows you to just grab the edges and allows you to just copy edge face edges along the surface now you could also hold tab and middle mouse button to do an entire edge loop so just like you can kind of hold ctrl shift and you know remove entire edge loops you can hold tab and middle mouse to copy entire edge loops or tab and just left click to copy edges okay now again as you start to build up some surfaces and you don't want faces you can hold ctrl shift and just start deleting them now you can click and drag hold as you're going and delete entire edge loops or face loops that way and you can let's say if things are a little bit messy and unorganized like this you can hold shift and do a relax so shift uh left mouse button does this nice relax and look how it just kind of evenly distributes all of your edges all right so i would say that is the majority of the tools here that you're you're going to be using as you're continuing to build up and i guess one thing is you can always just hold tab and just click and that'll just kind of plot a face here so if you're going through and adding some tools uh you can do that i guess the last thing here is the quad draw tools or options so if you hold ctrl shift uh right mouse button you can grab these tools here so as you saw like i can hold ctrl shift right click clear dots boom now the one nice thing to keep in mind is you can hold ctrl shift right click grab multi cut or just simply grab it from the multi cut here or of course hold shift as you're kind of in quad draw mode shift right click and grab multi cut now what's nice about this as you're grabbing multi-cut is it will snap to the live surface so you can see that i'm going in and adding so if i actually delete maybe this one and then i am cutting in some edges you simply can do that and it'll add all of these edges and snap them to the surface which is really cool and you don't have to worry about going back and snapping something so the multi-cut tool works right within there so boom you can see how that just adds in all of that topology there and it snaps it along the surface all right so that in a nutshell or i would say is a pretty high level quick rundown on how to use all of the quadrot tools on the majority of the quad draw tools now let's get into the important part which is edge flow and topology all right so now that we've gone through and understand how to use quadra let's take a look and now really understand retopology and topology and edge flow all right so the number one thing that i can i can tell you for topology and retopo is if i go ahead and show you this group here and it's this uh start group here and if i go ahead and hit quad draw take a look at this the number one tip when starting out and retopologizing your models is to start with your edge loops and face loops first all right you can see here that i've done that this is exactly what i've started with everything that you see here in the blue and you saw you see that i'm i'm focusing on the eye loop i'm focusing on the mouth loop and you can kind of see i have the horn and nose area here and you know i've i've gone and worked up the ears as well and i'm just kind of starting and you can see all these details here as well you can see right around here i have kind of that skull deformation in there so i know i'm going to need some topology to focus on that and then where the horns are coming out right now this is a fairly complex model but what i'm trying to show you is how you can take these these simple key concepts principles and workflows and apply them to complex objects all right so now the next thing you want to keep in mind is you want to start with edge flow in topology first all right and you want to make sure to kind of keep a good spacing of your face loops so if i go ahead now and drag or grab my dragon here kind of isolate that and i'll go ahead and enable quad draw you want to go ahead and like i said kind of just start with a good distribution of edges now you don't want to go too small so if our do right now is to start with edge flow and face loops that don't here is don't make them too small or too big right use kind of your best judgment now what i mean by that is if i go ahead and plot this face down here and you kind of start with this you can see that it's like okay so i'm going to kind of start with this face and i'm going to just start extruding out right and we're starting to extrude out and we're starting to cover a lot of surface area here but you're going to eventually reach a point where you're like okay well i need to add more detail there and i need to add more detail there for the nose and then the eye how do i go about that right so i see this a lot when students are starting out they just kind of want to cover the the most ground as possible right and then when you do this this is setting you up for a lot of challenges to have to cut in manually which is the complete opposite of using a tool like quadra right you kind of want to just use multi-cut towards the end as you're finalizing rerouting edges right and now on the opposite end is if you got something like this then for something that's even like kind of detailed here you're starting with really really small faces okay so think about it as you know time is money clicks is money and just the amount of effort that you're spending here working on you know re-toppling your models if i'm going in here and just adding adding adding every one of these edges that i'm adding is essentially more more clicks right and not even from a timing standpoint but from a complexity standpoint so if i add too many now it's just way more to deal with and i'm just kind of creating a lot more problems or a lot more to worry about down the road right so you can see how i'm adding this and sometimes you don't even notice you're doing it you're so zoomed in you're like okay let's keep going let's keep going and you're just adding geometry adding geometry and then you zoom out and you're like oh crap like i've added way too much detail here i don't have enough detail here do you want to keep a good high level view here right so if i'm kind of going i mean i i kind of just keep a good nice even distribution you know and the good thing is you can always add more as you need it so just find a good happy medium between large polygons and small polygons and depending on the surface of your details that's definitely going to be something that you want to keep in mind from the get-go all right now now that we understand we're focusing on edge flow we're focusing on uh face loops we're keeping in mind a good size and distribution of edge flow now we want to make sure to understand how to do what's called localizing topology which is something that i covered in my last video right so i'm going to pull up my pure ref here and you'll see this this uh this image here this kind of legend that i use where you're starting with one polygon you can take that and convert it into two by splitting or adding this looping edge here or you can take that and continue it even further and add four so by using this method here where you're kind of adding these faces here which allow you to add two more faces and then you can take that and split it and add what's called a diamond or a kite quad okay so if i go over here so i'll go ahead and just simply delete this and what i want to do is show you what i have here which is uh this okay now if i go ahead and control one isolate you'll kind of see what what i've got here so based off of this legend here you can see what i have going on okay so the key thing here actually is the green faces are my edge loops these are the edge loops and the face loops that i started with initially okay so i started with these and then you can see that i've gone now and added a lot more detail okay and i'm using things like these kite quads here so i've kind of highlighted them uh as you can see and i'm using you know kites i'm adding these um kind of this two to four so we're starting with two faces here and then we're adding in these faces that allows us to have one two three four right and then that you can see i can localize this topology and it's allowing me not to have and not to carry that topology through all the way uh through the rest of the skull and you can see that exactly happening here where i have this kai quad here and i just need a another edge or two for the brow area instead of having to take and adding in these edges all the way throughout the skull right so because you want to avoid adding in needless edges right so you can see that i have my quadra face here and if i wanted to add some edges to add some more detail i don't want to adjust so you can see kind of this brow area maybe may need a little bit more detail well i don't want to just simply you know just start adding in edges like so because that's just going to add edges throughout the rest of the model and look how just that messes everything up right so adding in these three edges here really really dirty things up so i can go in here and i can delete these edges or by holding ctrl shift and clicking those that's going to help right and then now what i can do actually what i always recommend is to use uh symmetry with world x here and you can see i need a little bit more geometry so i'm going to kind of quickly show you how to do this live so if i i start with this one here you can kind of see where i'm going to try to work so i want to work in this area here to add some more detail on the brow so i'll go ahead and kind of delete these faces here and then now i'm going to go ahead and add in these faces like so so watch how i'm kind of going ahead and starting to add that and the technique that i'm using is this one right here how to go from two to four so i'm going and adding in this piece here so now that i've got that i can go ahead and start adding in this geometry and we can start to get more of that detail here and more of that geometry and then now you can see i can go ahead if i wanted to add that throughout the rest of the model so i could go ahead and add it there right and you get something like this and i'm just left clicking to add those faces here and then i can go ahead and remove this one and just go ahead and bridge that across all right so now we get this which is going to help us hold this brow area a lot better and i can hold left click and drag to do this relaxing that we talked about so now that's going to help kind of space this out a little bit and give us a nice distribution along the mesh and so we're just adding in some more form there all right so you can see with symmetry plus relaxing we're getting some nice good detail there right so this is just one example of how you can add some more geometry and and route your edges here so you can see i need to clean up just a little bit here sometimes it acts a little bit weird but there we go and there you are so you can see how i've how i've done that now even though this dragon is a organic model these techniques can be applied to hard surface examples as well okay so now if we take a look at this ear i think this ear is a perfect example of this technique in this workflow right so if i go ahead and isolate this ear you'll see you know something very organic here so i'm i'm showing you the green edge loops so the face loops here so these green face loops are the edge loops that i started with and you can see that you're going from a lot of detail here we need a lot of edge flow and topology and polygons but it ends up here in this very fine point so you can see if we go back to this the polygon techniques here we're going from 2 to 4 to 6 and then back down right so you can see i'm starting here with the 2 and then i'm adding in this technique here where i'm getting the four and then i'm doing that again right so i have the four and then now i'm getting one two three four five six right and then it's even more right so i can go ahead and do that as i'm going for the ear canal here so we're going one two three four five and then one two three four five six seven eight right and then this technique here here is this routing the edge that i'm using uh right here there's two polygons right about here okay and then you can see the kite that i'm using here which is this yellow technique here right about here all right so you can see how i'm using that all throughout the mesh right and i'm using that especially for something as complex and organic but everything is still is still manageable right and is organized i can select these and you can still see i have a nice clean face loop here i select this i have a nice clean face loop there i've gone ahead and added in kind of this this routed this edge flow here these face loops only in this area so this is this right here is a perfect perfect example of localizing your topology and only adding topology where you need it okay because i don't need to just continue to route and start adding in things where i don't need them all right because the other thing i wanted to show you is that i'm also using triangles right now in triangles in areas that aren't deforming and for retopologized or low poly models is a hundred percent fine you can keep triangles and use triangles as needed without having to add more complexity to your models all right so you're starting to see that being applied all throughout the mesh here and you can start to see you know hopefully it's starting to make sense um where that's happening in practice okay all right so the next step that i have is how do you go ahead once you add the face loops is go ahead and just make sure to add good clean even distribution of edges throughout the rest of the model so if i go ahead with this this is the earlier part of the process so i'm going to go ahead and just quad draw on on this part of the model what i don't recommend doing is this where you're kind of just starting here um and then building up and it's just a lot more clicks right and then you can see like if i add maybe some some geometry here and going up and we're just we're just adding a lot more clicks so what i can do right if i hold ctrl shift left click to delete all that is instead i'm just going to go ahead and kind of add in these larger faces that i know i'm going to add detail to all right and i'm going to want to make sure to match the end geometry here edges to the end geometry here at the target same thing going horizontally and vertically here so i can go ahead and just kind of you know add in some of these geometries or these edges and i can just make sure that i have the edges to copy over i'm using tab and middle mouse to copy these over so we're going to get something like this here and we can see i can probably add this one to right about here and i can use tab again to get somewhere right around here i won't merge these or weld these yet now i want to make sure i'm using a a fong and a blend or a blend and i'm using the highlights of the object to make sure that i stick with you know conforming to the main curvatures of this object right so or our our our models here so we can have something like this and there we go just kind of redo that face there and then i'm going ahead and just adding that across so you can start to see now okay i have a pretty pretty close here i know i'm going to do like kind of this kite quad effect on this piece here and i want to make sure just to kind of match and conform to the surface i'm looking at this broad highlight here on the dragon and then i'm going to add in another kind of face here or manipulate these vertices here so there we go something like this that's looking pretty good and then now i want to start building off of this eye so if i go from this eye now the orbit of the eye i can start to kind of come out from there and then i'll start to know pretty close how much geometry i'm going to need to match up between the two let me get something like this i'm going to keep this one right about here now i may it looks like i'll probably have to add one that runs about here actually is what i did is added some more detail at the rand there but we'll come back to that one i'll show you at least how i handled that and we can start continue with this we can start to see that i'm going from here continuing the orbit of the eye so i'll kind of stop it right there so you can at least kind of see how now i'll connect these parts here so i know now i'm going to have to match one two three of these edges along to about this part of the the dragon's nose so i'm now going to come down to here and we're going to see how you know we're going to merge these two pieces here so if it gets a little bit tricky i'll just go ahead and tab left-click and that should work and this is why i didn't go crazy and add too many pieces of geometry but i'll show you kind of how you know we'll see how i handle this area here right and i'll go ahead and continue that continue this here kind of left clicking on the inside and we get something like this right now so i'll keep this one i'll just tab this one out all right and i'll probably go from here all right so we get something like this now well that's where i can start to add in this point you can kind of see how i can take all of these ones and using that kind of that six to four you know to two method i can do that here ctrl shift remove that piece and then we get something like this and i can weld this edge so good so i'm starting to get some pretty good geometry here i would say i have one more that i can add there and maybe i can bring this down probably a little bit a much much closer lower here right so i'm going to keep this a bit tighter for now all right so we have that and we'll keep this kind of following this main highlight here and we can focus on that and we have this so far so i'll go ahead now so you can see what i have here i can go ahead and start to weld these together so i've welded those together and then you can see now i'm going to go ahead and add one more here in the middle which i know i'm going to need and this is going to be part of this kite quad here so i can go ahead now and kind of add this like so and i can move this a little bit over and we can kind of see how we uh deal with that so it's just kind of adding and removing as we go and you know i'll go ahead and tab left click to bring that out and go ahead and snap these verts right so you can start to see again how i'm just you know adding this at a high level here and we get something like this and then now if i need to we can go ahead and add a little bit more geometry to this part of the dragon or the nose of the dragon so i can go ahead now and add that in there so i'm only adding in as i needed to conform to the geometry right so i can go ahead and kind of follow these and start snapping these together and there we go and i'll just gonna move this finish that off there and you can start to see i'll move this over and just boom add in that so you can kind of see how i'm going through and doing this part and then we know we're gonna need probably another edge that runs along here and then now we can start to connect the eye portion over here and we can kind of come up to this part of the brow and we can start to add in that geometry there right so i'll probably take it to maybe just about here where i can bridge this maybe i'll just add in one more edge that runs like so i'll do it like this and we can tap that to connect this and we'll just uh shift click that you can kind of see again just how we're just manipulating and adding and just making sure that we're keeping the same amount of face loops and edges to uh add and to connect from one end to the other kind of messed that one up there we go so i i think i can you know you you get the idea i didn't want to go too long here but uh because i'll show you kind of uh a narrated version uh as well and so you can kind of see i now i can continue this and working my way so this is just a quick high level of how i'd start with the eye loop in the face loop work my way across and you can see now it's a little bit uneven no worries that's where i can start to hold shift and start relaxing this and getting that nicer detail and distribution of edges along our mesh and look at that it's starting to really clean that up and then now i can space things out even and add in more geometry without you know uh just kind of focusing on the overall form and if i need a little bit more you move things up you space them out and move that now you can of course entirely manipulate entire edge loops with middle mouse uh middle control shift middle mouse there we go and you can just now start to shift left click and just kind of relax that out all right so uh next i will cover how i handle the ear and narrate it and just do a quick narration of that working right now so this is a time lapse this is sped up just so i can kind of narrate what i'm doing here so you can see that i already have the ear loop the the key face loop that runs all the way around the ear and i'm just kind of building off of that all right and once i build off of that i can then start to continue to add geometry where i need it so i'm going ahead and kind of adding in the thickness that's around the the dragon's ear and then i'm adding in geometry as i need it and i'm focusing on good clean face loops and a good even distribution of edges now i'm going to the inner part so you can see how i'm going from a very narrow tip of the ear and how i'm going into a much wider deeper more detailed part of the ear canal and i'm using that same technique you guys i'm using that same technique where i go from six to four four to six two to three um and then now i'm building just like the back of the ear i started building the back of the ear at this point so i can keep the geometry matching all throughout and you can see i've started to add the two to four geometry method the face method and then now i'm going through and adding in you know that technique all throughout the mesh i'm localizing my topology only adding topology where i need it and you can see i'm using the technique that we just talked about where i'm using large faces and then just connecting from one end to the other which helps save saves quite a bit of time and then i'm back here at the ear canal now that i got the rest of the geometry blocked out and i'm going through and just using a combination of kites quads going from four to six um adding a triangle in a rigid area and then just kind of finishing everything out i have nice clean face loops nice clean edge loops and just controlling the overall topology so i'm just taking these techniques that we're talking about and applying it through this complex object all right and so the last thing i wanted to cover is just to make sure to understand and to look at some good reference and to study to study topology right so here's like the shoe model that you can see that i'm using those types of techniques all over the place you'll see that i'm using you know that double kite here all throughout the mesh just to add some geometry i'm using the the you know four to two or two to four four to six type edge flow you know study good character topology as well hard surface and organic stuff you know you'll you'll see that everywhere these techniques aren't specific to hard surface aren't specific to organic characters you know and here's some some nice hard surface examples here then i'll jump to art station in just a moment where you can see you know if you if you find a good surface model or a hard surface modeler you're going to find these techniques just all over the place now remember triangles are a hundred percent fine especially on flat surfaces but you'll see you know going from you know uh localizing areas of topology where you're going from wide a lot of topology to narrow you're going to be using these techniques that i've talked about today you know exactly here you can see uh these these types of examples with with topology here going from the one to the two to three uh faces here it's just it's just the way to do it all right so some good examples there and you know you can see here the guys that i'm referencing from art station here's ben ert um you know i think aramis did a good breakdown aramis 3d uh where he talked about uh just his workflow and work style uh so make sure to check that out but you know just you know take a look at what what a lot of the professionals are doing uh industry professionals you know so i'm trying to do my best to share my information but you'll see just so much more information uh and examples out there uh here's andrew hodgson where he shows how he you know starts with a concept just you know nasty triangulated stuff just to get the form and then he shows how he goes from that the concept to production and then the finally the subtee model which is just a subdivided version of this and that technique he's using is all throughout every single one of his models which is just again just how you do things all right so i hope this was helpful again it was just kind of another deep dive and uh oh yeah i almost forgot about this one this cool looking aircraft model by michael um color is here and he's just i mean he works cd projekt red i mean this was just i saw this it was fantastic stuff and you'll see again you'll just see this stuff all over the place with kite quads diamond quads and you know coming back to this it's just this being applied over and over and over again all right so i did my best to show you guys that in practice on this what i would say is a fairly complex model organic model but it can be broken down into simple topology rules and you can start to create just a good even distribution a good workflow all right so to summarize always start with edge loops and face loops don't make your faces and edges too small right do localize topology so making sure that you kind of keep topologies in areas that you need it and don't unneedlessly add geometry where you don't need it don't just start adding that's not going to add a lot to the form and you can just see it just starts to ruin things that you don't need okay so those are just some high level rules um and tips do's and don'ts when doing re-topology so i'll wrap it up there if you guys have any feedback um tips of your own questions comments let me know down below i'm hoping to now cover uh jump back to the cyberpunk grenade where i'm going to be covering the high to low workflow so i have the high poly subd model and then i'm going to work on showing how to create the low poly version uh using retopologizing and texturing through substance painter uh and rendering so uh with that i'll end it there and i'll see you guys around so take care and be safe

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 13,601

Keywords: 3D, modeling, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, tips, workflow, speed, improve, best, bumpy, fix, intro, understand, understanding, edge, flow, basics, retopo, re, retopology, quad draw, polygon

Id: 4-mPIVSBt9g

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MossBalthazar]

thanks

[u/mc_bee]

I started 3D modeling back before the days of zbrush, where edge flow was the upmost frustrating puzzle to solve, glad I have the skills now to play this never-ending triangle game.

Good tips on the starting with outline edge loops though, I semi-do it but then wing half of it, I'll keep that in mind for my next retopo model.