Ngons to SubD is easier than you think! (Blender Tutorial)

hey what's up guys this is going to be a pretty fun video at least fun for me and i'm going to show you how you can take a bullion and bevel based mesh this is from a tutorial i made a few months back but i'm going to show you how you can take boolean and bevel meshes and convert them into sub d ready objects so this is going to be a bit longer for tutorial because it's going to take some time to do but you are going to learn a lot and i think it's going to be useful for you to sit through it so what we need to do is first of all assess exactly what's going on with this object now the first thing i notice here is that this object is symmetrical over the x-axis so i can split my time and ha actually i can split my time and no i couldn't because it's actually a few decisions i can make here i could split my time in half by running a bisect and mirror modifier so i could just do this quickly with hard ops we'll do bisect and modifier and then i only have to deal with this side except i just noticed it's causing some weird problems we'll put that above the bevel there we go and i'm only going to have to deal with this one side and that cuts my work in half now you might think well i can't do it on the y-axis because i have a hole here but i don't have a hole over here but i'm going to mirror it over the y-axis anyways because patching this up back into a flat surface from a hole like this is going to be a lot quicker than having to you know deal with a little bit more work on this side as well so i'm going to show you how easy it would be to patch this up so in this tutorial we will be getting rid of these bevels so this will all be flat so it's going to be as easy as simply taking these vertices here turning on auto merge and then just pulling these out and then once these bevels are gone we do the same thing up here and then we're literally back to a flat shape so i'm actually going to make that compromise for time and also run a bisector modifier on this direction as well even though it produces the same result in the back so sometimes even though certain areas are not symmetrical it's actually a good idea to make that compromise because you can easily get back to that result you have before so now we've done is we've put our work into basically a fourth of the time it would have taken us maybe you know a little bit closer to half because this would be a bit shorter but you get the point so the first thing we need to do is take a look at these bevels now this is precisely why i tell people to use even segment bevels in case you ever want to go back and decimate down your mesh you want to make sure you have an even number or even segment bevel because watch this if i alt shift click and i go here you're going to see the mistake i made when i originally made this model it's going to actually hurt the holding edges of the curvature here which is not going to be the most desirable result but that's a mistake i made early on in this file so not much i can do about it now but that's why i'd always recommend using an even number so that way you're not disturbing those holding edges around the bevels anyways i'm just going to go ahead and dissolve this one out and that'll be fine and you're going to already see it kind of hurts the shading because it's not perfectly flat anymore but what can you do we'll get it back to where we need it to be in a little bit so what i'm going to do now is just alt shift click the rest here going to decimate that out and um you know we're eventually going to have to keep going in here and just decimating the rest of these so we're going to end up making that compromise anyways but if you're doing this as like a game asset you'd probably keep the bevels held anyways so it's just always a better idea to run an even segment bevel just to avoid these problems in this case i suppose it doesn't matter too much all right so a few different things i would keep in mind here so we're eventually going to convert this into a sub d ready mesh right and technically if we have a low number of segments on a bevel the sub d would probably run fine around here but the sub d is also going to perform pretty well if it's completely flat so it's kind of a decision you have to make if you want to keep a holding bevel in here or not now um this bevel isn't nice and uniform because of the nature of my dissolves right here so i'm going to actually go ahead and really get in here and just dissolve this whole thing out i'm going to take this area and we're just going to snap it on the y-axis to here and we're also going to do it here and just make sure everything's nice and aligned and let's see over here i definitely want to keep this uh this hole now obviously this hole has way too many segments so what i'm gonna do is circle select i guess we could technically alt click in face mode and then go into edge mode and deselect these that would be a bit quicker and what i'm going to do is use a checker let me also do select this we're going to use a checker deselect and let me turn off shadow because it's causing some problems i'm going to turn that off we're going to go up here to checker deselect now i don't want to dissolve these holding boolean edges here so i'm going to actually increase the offset by one control x to dissolve it we're going to repeat the process because once again 32 segments is a bit too high for a sub d in my opinion or 64 segments rather but we're going to do the same thing we're going to come in here check or deselect and that one did not actually the reason it didn't work was because i forgot to deselect those we're going to go to checker deselect here and the same thing control x and i'm going to dissolve this down to probably about i'm thinking 8 vertices should be fine 8 is going to be more than enough and at this point i can just manually select around here and dissolve these out so this is going to be one two three four five six seven eight so eight vertices is going to hold this very nicely when you run a sub d and i'll show you why i'm just gonna add in a cylinder here and we're gonna set this to eight vertices and notice what happens let me crease the top and the bottom end gones here so it doesn't get distorted now watch what happens if i run a sub d at a level of two you're gonna see that actually subdivides very nicely and makes that nice and round and i could even you know ramp it up one more if i wanted to and whoops i did not mean to do that let me clear the sharps and the seams here there we go and you're going to see that actually subdivides very nicely from an 8 segment you could use 16 as well i guess 16 would produce an even smoother result but you can always ramp up the sub d as well depending on what you're going for i think two is perfectly fine in this case and this is going to be the roundness that we're going to have over here on this 8 segment and like i said if this is a bit too faceted for you you could of course just i've went with a um a 16 segment but with a 16 segment comes a lot more clean up duty when it comes to connecting edges and things like that so you have to make that decision for yourself anyways we have a bit more work to do here so i need to continue to get rid of these random nasty edges right here so i'm going to dissolve this out and these right here and dissolving is really easy just hit it with ctrl x and blender usually does a good job at that and you're going to see by doing that we've completely removed that bevel we had here originally just by dissolving geo out now just to make sure this is perfectly flat i'm going to press s y and then 0 and you're going to see that it actually flattens it out so there's not going to be any weird shading issues you can kind of see perhaps not on youtube but with a matte cap you can see we kind of have some shading warps right here i doubt you can see it with youtube's compression but you get the point we want to flatten out this face so s y are these faces s y and zero so that's fantastic now the next thing we want to do is we want to come in here and take care of this area as well so i'm going to cross my fingers and hope i did an even number on here just to make it easier which i did and you're going to see that actually retains those holding edges which we'll be getting getting rid of soon here anyways um so what do i want to do here i'm going to dissolve that out and we're going to go to we'll just leave it at three segments here because i think that's going to give us a more desirable result compared to a completely flat beveled area right here so basically no bevel at all and i'm also going to just um i can't dissolve that one out so i'm just going to merge that here for now that's fine we'll take care of that later all right so already it's looking better we have to do the same thing over here going to take care of this side and just dissolve out nice and evenly and i'm going to leave this at the three four segments as well that's going to subdivide very nicely and this is kind of how i go about doing these dissolves it's a lot nicer a lot cleaner this way at least in my experience so you can do it however you want only issue is since i'm disturbing the holding edges of the bevel what actually happens is this face right here let me undo it notice how this face kind of pulls in a little bit and this area is no longer flat so we'll have to take care of that in a little bit here but for now i'm just concerned with taking care of these bevels and getting them into a more low poly state for the sub d so it's going to get in here give that a nice four segments four edges we're gonna get in here as well and take care of that and actually instead of doing it this way i'm gonna do it this way because then i can easily go up here and then s z and then zero to flatten that face this one i want to flatten as well s x and then zero it's a very small difference but you can kind of see that face is flexing a little bit that's always a good idea here is going to be sc and then zero and then here is going to be s x and then 0. now as for this one this one's a bit trickier what i actually want to do is scale this along the custom orientation now if i press g and zz or xx or yy we don't actually have access to that custom orientation along the normal i want to be able to pull this face or scale this face face rather along the normal so what i'm going to do is um turn that on in the overlays panel here i want to be able to move this and scale it along that normal right there and the best way to do that is to simply go up here to this orientation panel and add a custom orientation which will add a custom orientation based off of this normal and now i can actually move it in that direction and in this case i'll press s z and then zero and it looks like it was already flat so no harm no foul there and just so we're safe we'll change back to global orientation on this one and you know in just a few minutes here we've already decimated this thing down into a much lower poly state and granted this is a much you know simpler model but i really wanted to demonstrate with a simple model here because the theory and ideas can transfer to something a lot more complex so we've taken care of this area we also need to get in here and take care of this this is going to be something we have to you know decimate down a little bit and for some reason i have a random edge right here probably from a symmetry no problem so we're going to do that and we could probably make this even lower poly and we'll do something hmm how do i want to do this that's going to actually be a tricky compromise because then we're going to have to end up quadrifying this in a cleaner manner i'm just going to leave it here i don't think that's going to be too high of poly how it is i think it's fine all right so we're not we're at a much better place or we can actually start preparing this thing for a sub d now if i try to run a sub d at this moment in time it's just going to collapse because we have n gones all over the place so we need to take care of that first thing now sub d conversion can be very intimidating and the best way i would recommend approaching these is to start simple once you start seeing something it's like a puzzle piece once you start seeing a few of those puzzle pieces come together it doesn't look as intimidating because you can see the bigger picture same thing with these um quadrifications here what we want to do is just start start with something simple this one right here i can easily quadrify by simply we'll just delete the faces and then we'll even um come in here and just grid fill it and get ourselves a nice result like that in just a few seconds so that one's super easy same thing for down here we're gonna actually want to quadrify um this area do we need to technically not it's a flat face and you can increase these flat-faced areas and get something desirable that way but we're of course going to do it anyways we're going to come in here and let's see i'm going to actually need to join an edge right here with the f key and let's try using a grid fill and seeing how well that works which in this case was nothing to really glamorize over so what i'm going to do instead is provide a natural proximity loop around this edge right here for our sub d by taking this face and pressing i to inset and i'm going to also press the b key to hold it to the border now it's not holding to this border over here which immediately tells me that this is this is most likely a non-manifold geometry issue meaning the reason it can't hold to this right here is because it can't determine where that border is so my guess is we have an interior face which lo and behold we do and this non-manifold geo we need to get rid of so we're just going to terminate it by deleting the faces there and my screencast key is turned off let me turn that back on okay there we go so now if i press i to inset it's actually going to inset on that border now by pressing the b key so you know little tricks like these you'll kind of remember over time but most likely when that happens you should um check for non-manifold geo that is a telltale sign so this is going to be okay for right now i'm just going to leave it like that and what else can we do easily in this case and my blender crashed off off a camera so pretend that was still there there we go all right so we have quads and you know the important areas now this is where it's going to get kind of tricky in uh you know portions like these let me dissolve that out so let's wait on that and let's just take care of this portion over here so the easiest way to you know convert these into quads is to simply press ctrl r scale that down i'll press s z and then zero if you want to straighten it and we'll snap it to that vertex and then join this together and that's going to give us a nice result but let's merge these together there we go so now we have all quads except this right here which is fine and that should work okay now what else is easy in this portion now we definitely want to do is provide some areas of buffer for the sub d so that way we're you know we have proximity loops around here when we run the sub d it's not super rounded out so i'm going to actually alt shift click these edges here we're going to press ctrl b set it to two segments and then press the p key and make the profile set to one and that will give us a natural proximity loop right there we can repeat the process on these edges there's a natural proximity loop to hold the sub d and now we have to figure out exactly how we're going to go from this result right here and quadrify this area so let's just go ahead and play with it right now so the first thing i'm going to do is um let me merge that right there we're just going to kind of figure out a solution that kind of pops out at us and the first one i can see is that i can knife cut from here we'll press the z key to cut through and we technically could just cut straight through like that and get a decent result that way and that's going to maintain some quads and create one right here we could also connect this one up to this portion and get a result like that this one could go actually let's wait on that one and then just cut right here press the z key click and press enter to cut through so that way we have something like that and now we kind of have to play with these areas so you know in cases like these we just have to work with what we've got and then you know kind of go from there and figure out what the best solution will be from then on so i'm just going to kind of go for some obvious solutions here we'll knife cut this all the way through and you're going to see these are the end guns here they're going to be a bit tricky to deal with and that's because of the inconsistencies between the amount of vertices up here and the amount of vertices in this portion down here so technically it would have been easier to have a higher segment cylinder or you know whole cut right here kind of matching this portion but hindsight is always 20 20. so what i think i'm going to do is actually go for the pure sub d and no bevel opportunity which is for me to take these two and dissolve that out and i'm going to slide this up to here g and then z and then dissolve that out and that should actually still sub d pretty fine later on and for over here i'm going to dissolve this out dissolve this out and then slide this one up with auto merge turned on and we'll just snap this up to that portion that's a pretty decent solve right there and as for these areas just kind of depends on how far you want to continue that you know chamfered area down in this case not super far we'll slide that one in there dissolve out that edge and let's press g x and hold ctrl make sure you're in vertex snap of course and this is a bit of a problem isn't it so maybe that wasn't the best idea okay we're going to need to take care of this inconsistency right here so so let's snap it back here and let's just take this one and do this and then go back into global orientation and do that and then i'll still be all right so now that should be straight enough or perfectly straight rather and this area is just going to be a simple dissolve we'll just come in here and slide it like this you know if you're going for mathematical accuracy on a model like this you might want to be a bit particular with how you do these things but um obviously i'm just trying to show you the conversion from you know boolean and bevel to subd then we'll just take this and snap it here and then snap it down to this edge we want to make sure all these faces in this area are nice and flat and this portion is going to be pretty easy we're just going to dissolve that dissolve that and then we'll just make a compromise here slide it back and now we have a very very clean result let me snap this down as well and everything should be nice and straight now don't forget to save your blend file in case you crash i've already crashed three times in this tutorial i think because the original time i made this model was in an earlier blender version maybe it was like 2.90 or something anyways now we can do is make this into a quad by joining right there and this area is going to be a little bit tricky but we can definitely get that working in some way shape or form so let's hold off on that like i said i always want to focus on the easy areas first it's a lot easier to kind of see what you need to fix so we're just going to join those corners together without problem this is going to be a tricky area this is why i wanted to decimate this down to a lower poly version earlier and now i'm kind of seeing why it probably would have been a good idea and honestly it might still be i'm going to dissolve this out and we're going to make that choice right now and just you know deal with the consequences along the way so that's a bit lower poly which is going to be easier to work with and we're going to press ctrl r you could scale that down to zero like i said if you wanted to but i'll keep it nice and consistent we're gonna join that to here and make that compromise this end gone if i could continue down through here is gonna disturb the curvature of this natural cutout so what i might do is let me think how bad would this look if i slid this here and made the compromises on these edges would it look worse well obviously you know the way it's kind of cornered yes but i was curious as to how much i could actually get away with that by you know sliding we could press the g and then x and move that up and play with it this way and just kind of get an idea of how that would look and i think i might actually make that compromise not a bad one all right so let's just undo that and do this a bit more precisely and also the other solution could be to kind of disturb the curvature and play with situations like this but that is an awful idea which i'm not going to do so i'm going to actually slide this area but it's sliding in consistently which is not what i want unless even works i guess not so let's go ahead and just take this edge and press g and then x and then g and then z and then just kind of get this as close as we can to something that'll end up working out i'm going to take this area as well g and then x we'll do that and then what i'm going to do is merge this here merge that there and then s x and then zero it's a nice and easy way to solve that and there we go now we didn't have to disturb the curvature at all which is exactly what i wanted all right so we're in a good spot right now let's do a test sub d but you know real quick before i do a test sub d let's try to make a a compromise over here i really don't like this but what are you going to do we need it so we're going to join that there and see how a joint over here would look and how we want to continue this maybe we'll join like that and then join like this which isn't going to work apparently so we'll just use the good old knife cut we'll cut here and then cut here slide it up a bit maybe something like that and now we're going to have an end gone in this portion but easy enough to solve this one especially on a flat area we can just um do something like that and just to make this a bit more even i'm going to take this face and just snap it up to here i think that'll look fine and we for some reason have a weird edge i think it's from my knife cut anyways just get rid of it there we go that looks fine i'm also going to use the machine tools clean up tool if you guys don't have machine tools it's a free add-on it's amazing you just press the three button on the keyboard and it actually cleans up any areas of your mesh that aren't looking too good but in this case it was perfect so nothing to worry about there but it cleans up like duplicate vertices non-manifold you know vertices floating around geo things like that so yeah i'd recommend grabbing that okay so we're gonna have to solve this area in a second but it's gonna be a really easy one we're just gonna come up here and do something like this and then something like this and then just cut all the way through like that and if we just hop to the bottom we can continue this on all the way through like so and that's kind of you know what we have to do to make it continue along nicely you could make this even by you know making these vertices kind of span out a bit further to even out the portions of the mesh you know kind of put it over here and have that connect in that direction then you could even come in here and do the same thing in this area just to make it look a bit more you know appetizing we could come in here and you know play with things like this but at the end of the day it's kind of like how much do you really care to keep it nice and even like that doesn't matter all that much but it is going to bother me so that's why i'm doing it to keep it as even as possible there we go let's real quick check for any n-gons we might have i'm going to go to select and then select all by trait faces by sides and you want to set it to greater than four it's set to equal to by default set it to greater than four and that'll actually display any n-gons you have on your mesh and in this case i have one which is fortunately just a mistake really easy to fix that and then if we try it again you're gonna see we don't have any selections which is perfect we could also try equal to three check for any triangles and that's good as well so um we're basically an all quad based mesh now if i were to drop the sub d right now it's going to look okay just okay right and the reason it only looks okay is because we've dropped the proximity loops in this area but not in these other areas or we need to hold that sub d so we're going to actually do that right now and also i just noticed this is a bit inconsistent we're going to fix that and let's just go ahead and make that buffer right now i'm going to control click around here be careful with it we're going to control click around and we're going to make that bevel control b to make that natural proximity loop it's a lot easier than having to go in here and then go in here and reroute it just crazy we're going to do it this way that looks good we're going to also do it around here right about there by the way if you're using hard ops i learned this trick from uh master xeon's tutorials um one of his hard ops tutorials i don't know how long this has been around but if you shift click on mark and then press the b key it'll actually do it that way while not disturbing the original profile of your bevel so if you want to do it that way you can but this is totally fine i'm just going to slide this not that one this one down a little bit just to make it cleaner i guess and i also wonder um i technically could cut this through right and then kind of make some compromises around here i kind of slide this through and we're going to have a big end gone in this area but i could kind of you know make the natural proximity loop this way and kind of have some more even geo flowing through which you know very well could work in a decent manner so you could do it that way we could also see what it looks like without making that choice just out of pure curiosity you know going through here and you're gonna see it this kind of disturbs the curvature a little bit more than i want i actually like how this looked before so i'm gonna go ahead and just do that i'm gonna cut this through here and continue it through here i didn't want to press the z key because i didn't want to cut through down to here and what we could just as easily do is dissolve that out slide these over for that natural proximity loop that were i cannot say proximity and i know someone's gonna say something about it i say like proxima and then it just i just lose it afterwards so if you guys can help me with that some pronunciation exercises might work maybe i'm saying it too fast i don't know but this should be okay the nice thing about these proximity loops there we go is that um you don't have to be super precise with them it usually holds pretty well as long as they're close by you don't have to be like crazy even with it or anything and this is a pull technically and it's probably not going to cause any problems though you know it's just all about what you like if you don't want to have that pull there then you know by all means just go with um well you're gonna have the pull over here but when you run the bevel it'll actually end up evening that portion out into the poles just gonna get pushed over here anyways i'm rambling now what i'm trying to say is this pull does not matter in this case it's going to be fine so we're going to have that and then i also want to have this is where it's going to get a little bit tricky so we're going to have to think about exactly how we want to do this so i already know i need a loop running up through here as well so we can kind of see how that runs and that does not run in the orientation i would have liked it to run i would have liked it to run through here and then up through here but obviously it's going to have to loop around somewhere so what i'm going to do is control click through here go all the way up through here down to here and then end at the spot we're going to press ctrl b to give that nice natural proximity loop i kind of set it kind of got it a little bit of a tongue twister there but i managed to say it correctly and then what i'm gonna do is take these areas that we made before and then just start merging them in this one here and you're gonna see we now have a triangle on this portion which i don't want so let me just merge this one down to here and then i'll just continue this cut to like right here like that and then i can take care of this area by just dissolving out these portions and that'll take care of that problem so i just want to kind of show you you know situations where you guys might think in one way but why it might actually not work out and this is kind of how i think about things i think what might work but what doesn't make sense about this operation you really got to think about that and figure out if it's a good compromise to have or not and in this case this is just a much better solution overall we're not going to have any sort of pinching that disturbs the curvature here and i do want to just make a quick note just for any um you know beginners out there just to clarify what i mean by disturbing the curvature i guess i don't explain that a lot in my videos so notice how we have a perfectly round cylinder every single edge around here is even but if we drop in a single edge right here and you know move it around and this disturbs that natural flow of the curvature notice how if i were to shade the smooth and turn on auto smooth it just kind of pokes out like a sore thumb in this area and that's what i mean by this by disturbing the curvature because if we don't have that nice even consistency going through then obviously we're going to have an issue with our curvature kind of pinching and the shading here looks a bit strange notice how it's kind of pulling my guess is these faces are not flat up here yeah see that these faces are not flat like they should be so we can actually do is select one of these faces or select a flat face actually select one of the flattest faces on here that you can see and in this case in none of them actually no this one is flat select the flat face go and add a custom orientation so that way it's custom oriented to this face right here and we're going to select all these other faces and scale it on the local z to that custom orientation and that should actually take care of that nasty shading we had before all right so let's go ahead and test a sub d here and see if we missed anything let me delete that bevel i don't know why it's still there i'm gonna run the sub d and you're gonna see it actually looks really clean we can shade it smooth turn off our auto smooth and we're gonna see we still have areas we need to actually kind of hold in here a bit better especially these portions so i'm gonna turn off the subd as a matter of fact i'll just turn it off in edit mode by clicking this button and turn auto smooth back on so it's clean to see so you're going to see we are missing a protection loop up here and also this should be back a little bit we'll go back in the global orientation and snap it to here like that and you're gonna see we have some portions right here that actually need protected like um this area going along here now if i just bevel this like it is we're gonna get this type of thing so what i'm gonna do is pull it until it hits those vertices what we can do is merge this here to here and then slide this up if you want to be accurate you can snap them of course and then dissolve that one out and then just kind of play with this a bit if you want to make it cleaner it's just me being pedantic so you don't have to you know go super crazy with it but if you want to keep it clean then by all means we're gonna have a protection over here and we also need to continue that protection down through here so cut and then cut dissolve that and dissolve that and then maybe i'll just move this a little bit on the x and that should be a nice protection in that territory we might even want to follow that curvature a bit nicer it's kind of up to you it's not going to matter too much at the end of the day though and this is a good situation where you can actually use pulse to your advantage especially on flat surfaces where they don't really matter you can run these poles to kind of make a compromise for these territories that need protective loops around where the sub d is going to be rounded so that's awesome we're going to do the same exact thing over here and you could have ran the loops or the cuts beforehand i just think it's easier to do it here in terms of visual so i can actually see what's happening and i don't need that big of a protection i just realized anyways we'll do that and then we can just merge these let's merge that one to there and then just snap these up snap these over dissolve that out and then dissolve these out and of course we can continue that cut like so that was a bit better than this side so don't yell at me i could have done that a lot cleaner but it's 407 in the morning i'm tired i'm gonna go to bed after this i think we're gonna go to right about here you should kind of get the point of what i'm doing by now but i do want to show the entire process because i understand sometimes just you know continually reinforcing what's happening can be a lot better for people learning so we have that still looks good we're going to dissolve these out for a nicer visual so we know where to cut i'm going to cut here and then cut here there we go that was a nice transition and this one we're going to have to protect as well unfortunately all these areas have to be protected in some fashion so we're going to do that and let the pull transfer power to this area so we don't have to run a loop down through here that would be awful and this is where you can really use these poles as transitions of power as i like to call it so what we're going to do is cut here cut here dissolve and the power has been transferred to that area so we're almost there we are almost there i promise we have this portion to take care of i'm gonna merge that into there dissolve that one's already pretty clean actually we could even snap that there and then dissolve these and how do i this will be a nice natural protective loop for this area but um let's just see what we can do over here well first of all i'm going to go ahead and cut through to here like that just slide these up a bit so that way we have a nice proximity portion right here this should be a bit closer as well i think but it doesn't matter too too much you do want to keep it even around here if um if you can like i said it's not crucial but it is going to look a bit cleaner so maybe i'll as a matter of fact just keep it even here than if it's a bit longer down here or shorter whatever but i do have the ability to tweak it in this portion by the way i just noticed that we have some extra loops in there we don't need make sure you get rid of those because they're not going to help you and this is the only area that we got to fix this one right here which kind of flows into this really tricky territory and i'm just going to flow it here into a try and just call it a day because that's going to give us the most practical result at least in this case so i'm going to have to do what we got to do to get the solution going and this should be just fine now let's just go ahead and run a triple sub d here so a level of three could even do a level of two it's going to be a bit less smooth but that's okay we'll turn off auto smooth because we're using sub d we always want to do that and now you can just easily hop in here and actually you know slide these things around make this tighter um you can turn the sub d back on in the preview mode and just kind of play with these you know slide things together move vertices up to make the territories tighter if you need to that's where you can really get in and refine the entire shape and get exactly what you want and this triangle shouldn't really be causing any sort of distress in this area so you're gonna see we have the quads kind of holding that area and if we go into wireframe mode let's turn off optimal display you're going to see the flow is a bit let's just say interesting coming up in this area but needless to say the tries will subdivide down into quads and get us a result that at least looks presentable here and you're gonna see not too bad a result at all we could go down to you know a level of one and kind of see this in a bit more uh standard form see how that looks and at this point you can just kind of figure out is there anything i could dissolve out here any non-contributing edges anything i get rid of to ease on the tension and in this case my answer is a no and you're going to see right here even with this it's not too too bad but you know look how that's going it's not exactly what i wanted so we're going to do is fix this area up here i'm just going to triangulate it and that should make it a bit easier on the sub d down there you're going to see with the triangulation it kind of pushes the triangles into the center and gives us a result that actually looks presentable compared if it was just a pure and gone you can see the difference there if you want to tighten this portion up a bit more what you could do is you know drop in a loop in this area and you'd be fine but you're going to kind of hit the curvature and here you can very easily see it especially with a matte cap you can kind of see how it's not very happy with what we've done but i guess you could technically dissolve these portions out and then play with some triangulations in this area and then you know just end it there and see if it's worth it to you or not it's not too bad just kind of depends on exactly what you're going for you can go ahead and take a look at the difference it's not really warping that area too bad so just something to keep in mind if you want to play with it some more and kind of refine the shape a little bit it doesn't look too bad that way at all and at this point it's just a game of refinement we come in here we refine the areas that could be tightened a little bit we're going to take this portion and slide it up and really get this territory tightened up so it looks like a bevel rather than a sub d so we're going to come in here and just slide these in a bit as well it's not too bad i can preview that i'm going to get rid of this i don't like that you're going to see just the more you kind of pull that in the more tight it looks and the more it looks like a a bevel based mesh and do the same thing on this one pull that in a bit to really make it more of a hard surface look we could come in here and grab these and then just kind of pull that out tick on even and that was apparently too much make that even more refined can take this slide it down take this slide it in i'm just going to do the same thing to all these other areas here and you can see how just kind of manipulating the geo and seeing what type of results you want you can really begin to make this look a bit more like a bevel-based mesh and just kind of get that nice natural hard surface feel to it and once again here's the wireframe view looks really nice there's one there's two here's optimal display if you want to see it a bit cleaner looks really really clean now like i said at the beginning of the video i wanted the back to be flat so here's where we could actually come in here and apply the mirror turn off subd or i guess keep it on that's fine and here's where you could just take the back and you know fix the back i'll actually turn off subd shade it smooth and turn on auto smooth and what we're going to do is expand the selection fill it in with the f key and just get to work you know deleting out the back that we don't want so we'll merge that in here what i'm going to do is select this area i could use limited dissolve but it's gonna affect the area or actually maybe it will work let's try let's try limited dissolve here yeah that will work perfect i was gonna say that limited dissolve would affect the entire mesh but um that's the decimate modifier so unless you selected the whole thing and then ran the limited dissolve of course but that's not what i was doing here we'll merge that in there um if you want to symmetrize in vanilla blender you just go into edit mode select everything then go to mesh symmetrize we're going to do from the negative x to the positive x as you can see here the positive x is the one with the line so that's going to symmetrize very nicely we'll turn the sub d on and it's still going to look you know fine back here we can even go into mat cap and although the geo back here is pretty nasty you know it gets the job done and if you really wanted to triangulate that and get something just kind of all depends on you know where your priorities are if you want to reach apologize this or whatever you know be my guest but i think the videos went on long enough and i think you should have the ability to kind of re-topologize a lot of your models now so as one last look we'll take another peek in here we have some really really clean shading the auto smooth needs to be turned off to really see the effect of it you're going to see it looks just like a hard surface model but we're using subd with a pretty nice wireframe so that's it for this video guys i really hope it helped you out and um i hope this kind of gives you an idea of how you can convert your ngon based meshes into sub d ready meshes for whatever project you might be working on and in general just these exercises are really good for understanding edge flow and topology and things like that so i'd really recommend taking a more simple model and practicing with that and then maybe something higher end if you're looking for something fun to do in the meantime we have a free course available on our website right now on the modeling of this sci-fi weapon and i think you'll really enjoy that one and my challenge to you is to go and take this course you don't have to pay anything it's going to only take you a few seconds to enroll and once you model this weapon using the techniques we show in that course my challenge to you is to attempt to read apologize into quads based off the information presented in this video and if you can do that then you are definitely in a really good spot in terms of topological understanding i wouldn't try to re-topologize the entire thing i just try to re-topologize one segment of the weapon maybe the barrel maybe the grip just one part so that way you don't overwhelm yourself and if you can complete that then you're in a really really good spot so that's my challenge to you after this video head to the link in the description grab this course for free go through it and then try to apologize it and practice the skills taught in this video thanks so much for watching drop a like if the video helped and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 16,679

Keywords: ngons, subd, subdivision surface, modifier, quads, blender tutorial, blender hard surface, blender beginner, blender hard surface tutorial, blender hardops, blender boxcutter, masterxeon1001, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blenderbros, blender donut, blender guru, hard surface modeling, hard surface, josh gambrell addons, 3d modeling, blender 3d modeling tutorial, blender 3d modeling, hardops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, boxcutter tutorial for blender, blender modifiers

Id: AuY_kHUya9A

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021