Retopology Masters #1 - Settings

hello and welcome to a brand new series called retopology masters this is a 15 video series all about using read topology in 3ds max but not just the settings and the basic things but all different things you can do with it using it with booleans hard surface modeling free-form modeling importing scopes and retapologizing them importing cad models which apologize them so just a lot of design things as well before i start like to thank autodesk for sponsoring this series and helping me and my channel and helping me deliver more great content for you guys also one more thing if you guys want to subscribe to any autodesk products max maya fusion 360 or anything else please use the link in the description it will help me out as well and give you a little prize too so it's going to be 15 videos of content i think would really help the way you guys think about modeling designing and using your topology so in this video i'll be talking about topology settings pretty much all these right here what you need to know to get the most out of this in the second video get more detail more complex and more creative all right so first of all i've got this object here which actually can show some issues when using topology so pretty much in order to get this what i did was just create a sphere and then i also create a cylinder i activate auto grid which will enable you to place objects on top of other objects so pretty much a created cylinder on here kind of move the inwards a little bit here so that it was intersecting and then i just went into at a poly selected this and then just chamfered this increasing the segments and the amount all right and then i also created a box then i moved it into here all right then i just went into compound objects and then pro bowling you can set this to a hotkey as well i like to use alt v all right subtraction move will get rid of things while the copy will actually have a copy for you so you can just for example start picking then kind of move a little bit and then start picking as well and just keep on reusing that so i did that to get this gap right here and then i switched it to union and we also using this as well so that's pretty much what i did to get this object all right so first of all i'll show you what i need to do before read topology i would just go into edit poly and i would start the processing of the topology i would do things like target weld so pretty much this was always kind of annoying process to do but if you work on polygons it was necessary in order to get good results when you subdivide you know insert additional loops set flow connect and do things like that but now we have the ability to quickly see of the process using retopology so the way it works is that there are three modifiers which can help you get the most out of this we've got mesh cleaner which you apply it and you click on detect problems so this comes in handy when you're importing from a cad program for example you can still have the generate edges zero the jar faces zero and you can actually activate non-manifold as well if there are some problems seriously click on repair selected and you're good to go so what i'm using right now is 3ds max 2021 i'm using update 3 and i was using the separate retopology tools so you actually need to download all those things so you pretty much need to download the version 3 update will give you the updated subdivide modifier and then you have the additional topology tools you will find that in your autodesk update app or the website if you have 3ds max newer version such as 2022 you will also have to download a separate installer for the topology tools for the first modifier is mesh cleaner we also have some divide what this will do is it will clean up a lot of the n-gons and the mesh a lot of the strange things that can happen as a result of cad programs or booleans and pretty much turn everything into triangles we have different cell divide modes we have sub-divide delaney adaptive and variable curvature different modes work with different situations you can see in this case the variable curvature did not work out too well so i would need to go something like certified it'll work out fine so in order to get good results with retopology you either need to apply some divide or into a player topology two times so to show an example of this with this one i have applied subdivide and then when i apply topology i will use let's say 1000 compute you can see i get really good results however with this one let me delete subdivide and just apply with topology and so what i want to do is try different settings here so let me try using some bad settings here compute all right you notice we have an absolute disaster happening here compared to the mesh on the right we have some really strange distortions happening here we have really messed up topology happening here which you definitely want to avoid you can see we have more density here and here it's just really bad so this is a really bad result but to fix this we can simply reapply another topology modifier and this time i'll set it to be you know 1000 we can decrease that compute notice how because we have two topology modifiers we go from absolute horror show to actually good topology so these are your options you can either a player topology twice or use subdivide before and both will give you really good results however in this case it seems that some divide on the right has given us a better result because judging with a topology you can see it's a lot more even on this area whereas here you can see we have kind of more irregularities and differences here also we have some vertices with five edges and this one with three edges which you always want to avoid if we can and this does not give us that at least for the top half now i can refine this even further i can apply a third topology modifier and decrease the face count even more now the reason skimming this is because after topology it can sometimes smooth things out however this is just a smoothing group thing and it's not actually making it smooth here so now we can introduce a fourth modifier smooth apply it activate auto smooth you can see how it will bring back those smoothing groups read topology let's go with even lower value compute and you can see how it may give us even simpler results so let's take a look at these topology settings so in order of what is most important least important we have the most important thing is the face count second important is the auto edge options and third important is the settings but before that we have the three options we have reform quadruple instant mesh reform is the most impressive one it's the proprietary topology technology we have here in 3ds max quadriflow is a much cheaper solution does not give the good results as reform and you can see how it kind of gives you a lot of bad results happening here we also have instant mesh as well which as you can see just kind of gives you a lot of these bad results so even though instant mesh and quality flow can be useful in some situations for most situations probably want to use reform which will give the best results so simply click on compute and depending on the complexity will take more time and it will show the new results if you want to reset x and click on reset and you get back to what it was before you apply your topology so next we have the reform settings so what i've noticed about the reform settings is that if you have a good face count they don't really matter too much don't really change things too much they also cannot save you if you have a bad face count so for example let me just enter in a thousand and then compute you notice how we have really bad things happening here we have the mesh starting to kind of fold in on itself get a really bad results so no matter what kind of settings we have here it's very difficult to kind of salvage this so i can just try zero zero zero we get that we can try to increase the regularizer regularize we can try to increase adaptivity you can see how that does help things that does solve that issue but it still is giving us bad results in situations so truly the most important thing is the face count although remember in this situation you can reapply another it's possible modifier and change to 500 and there we go so there's something very important to understand about how the topology works here you have to understand density of all the objects that you're using boolean on so to give an example of this let me create another cylinder here to really show you what i mean so this cylinder has 18 sides and i'll clone this out and i'll give this let's say the maximum with the 200 so the 200 will give us a lot more options than the 18 sides and what i mean by that is a lot more options of what kind of face count we want so for example if i apply root topology and then use 5000 you can see it gives us pretty good results nice and smooth here on the sides and fixing up the top and bottom all right so 5000 works 3000 works 1 500 100 they all work pretty well if you have a complex mesh if it's dense a lot of sides you can go to a much lower value however if you're using an already simple mesh with just 18 sides you cannot go higher and you cannot have the same options that you do with with the higher amounts so you can go from smooth to simple but you can't go from simple to smooth or to more dense so for example with this one if i apply reed topology and go with 5000 the problem now is because our original mesh is so angular here you can see we can easily count the angles one two three four whereas with the 200 we can't really count the angles it's super smooth here so if we have such a simple mesh and we try to have a really high amount with every topology what it's going to end up doing is going to end up inserting loops inside of here which completely ruins the curvature of this mesh you can see now we can very clearly see it's looking very fasted and we try and turbo smooth this it's not going to give us what we want it's going to give us a very angular result here so if you have a simple mesh like this you have to be careful what you enter here unlike with the right mesh you can't have five thousand here probably can't even have three thousand i know it's also bad maybe you can't even have 1000 although this looking a little bit better here but still not ideal with this one you need to go much simpler you need to go to maybe 400 and as you notice with 400 it's actually a good fit because it tries to maintain the same number of sides therefore keeping the smoothness once you subdivide and if you go too low it just gives us a really strange result so the reason why this is important is that if you have an object so let me just create a box here and then let me just add a poly and then i will just use chamfer here all right and then i'll just quickly weld alright so as you can see we have this with our six sides here after the chamfer and so let's say i do a very small boolean here this is going to create a problem for us because the way topology works with polygons that the smaller the detail you have the more density you need to properly support that so this object the main object is pretty low on density but in order to probably get this small little thing here we're getting a lot more loops running through here which means this is a very bad thing to happen so let me just clone this out and for this right one what i would do the preferred solution is to either have more density when you're chamfering use more segments or what i can do is just let's say turbosmooth with the sweden groups option to make this more complex and then i can re-pro boolean this is going to be a much better choice because now we have a lot more density with our main object and that will be easier to reach apologize for this small detail here as well whereas with this no matter what i choose here so let me go ahead and then use retopology so notice the problem in order to support that small detail we need a lot more density through here but that density is going to mess up our smoothness here and it's going to be very angular here so essentially we need to give the program enough density so it knows what our intention is so what i mean by that is that with our simple cylinder here you can give your cylinder eight sides because you know that you as an artist are going to eventually either crease those edges or sharpen it up here then certified and so your intention is not to have it be eight-sided but to eventually make it smooth but when you work with topology it doesn't know what your intention is so if you give it this object it's going to assume that you just want it to be angular like this unless you make it much smaller here so this is a very bad result because it destroys the smoothness that we intend for this object so if we go to 10 000 it can support that detail better but it definitely destroys all the smoothness that we want here and if we go to a much lower value that will definitely completely destroy the small object the smaller detail so either have much more density here or simply wait until after its apology to add these small details and don't use boolean for them simply reits apologize to divide so for example with this i'm not even going to boolean that in there i'm going to reads apologize then for example i can just collapse this let's say turbo smooth add a poly and then i can add that small detail but this object should be handled with no problem under problem i'm going to go into advanced options and i can just turn off no edge removal all right subdivide topology compute as you can see we still have the smoothness here because of how dense it was but we can still support the small detail and you see it turns it into pretty much a hexagon before we finish up here let's take a look at some of the settings for reform so we have quad tolerance which is pretty much how much are you willing to go above your face count the division factor will take a portion of your face count instead of violence for example if you set this to be two it'll try and give you 250 and subdivide it so most situation we just leave this at 10 and then one so regular eyes would try and keep the quads as regular as possible so in this situation you can see we've got this nice loop going around here so because of the chamfer we've got this happening here and what this will do is keep a nice loop around here however if we increase regularize if we prioritize the regularity of the polygons and then compute again notice how it kind of gives us this more kind of neutral results which is good for some situations but not good for here we actually do want the topology going around here because it will maintain the shape a lot better you can see the shape is kind of lost when the regularize is set to one but at zero pretty much gives us much better loops around here but you can see how it messes up a lot of other things here so in this situation notice the difference between regular as of 0 and then the default 0.5 and this is much better topology right here an isotropic is basically calculating between the uniformity of the polygons and how square they are so with zero we get this with one we get this so in this situation it's not much of a difference however in more extreme situations you'll notice a bigger difference here and adaptivity is how much it will change local distortions local changes in the shape so let's bring anesthetic back to point five with adaptivity of zero you can see we get this and then of one we get this right here so kind of adapts to the local conditions better to really see this in action let's make another mesh here i'm gonna make a plane and actually i'll go ahead and give it yes the default all right we create the plane here and then i can just apply the poly right away so what i'm going to do is i'll just select this and just say get this all right and i'm going to use set flow on this just to curve this out all right what i would do is select these two edges loop and crease this and then apply open subdiv all right so this is our mesh and we want to re-topologize this so i'm going to apply with topology so these settings down here auto edge i'll talk more about them as the situation requires so if i to reach apologize this let me go ahead and set a really low face count let's try 50 for example and then compute all right you can see right away it's not working because the smoothing groups have been all pretty much made as one you can see there's no sharpness here so for now let's turn off soothing groups and then just use by angle there we go and actually i'm going to go back here and sharpen this up as well all right so we're going to go ahead and turn off soon groups activate by angle and then decrease the face count all right it's giving us a pretty good result but it's also given us in this situation for this limited object it's giving us a very redundant number of loops all these loops going here in this direction are unnecessary because the most important thing is how it looks right here let's just say that we don't want these loops here so in order to do that we're going to need to change all these settings let's make regularize zero let's increase anisotropy and adaptivity and as you notice now it focuses a lot more on this curve as opposed to all those loops so pretty much when you do this when you have these settings you're telling the program what you focus on what is the priority so you're telling the program that the priority is getting this curve here as opposed to getting all these loops right here all right let's have a much lower value let's just go something like five for example as you notice we get this and look at the polygon count it's exactly five let's increase quad tolerance to a hundred compute and notice how now you're giving the program permission to go above five and now it's at ten and we don't have any of those loops running through here and it manages to very effectively capture the curve that we want with no extra loops so some of these settings can kind of overwrite each other so if i increase regularize to one and compute notice nothing happens because anisotropy and adaptivity are overriding that however if you want to add details in between here this will not benefit you we want to have high regularize and less of this and maybe increase the face counts so now we can do is we can add further details here that we could not we didn't have these loops here so that's it for part one tune in for next videos thank you for watching and take care you

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 18,944

Keywords: arrimus, tutorial, 3d, 3ds, max, model, modeling, topology, retopology, masters, how to, fast, easy, simple, start, beginner, film, asset, video game, poly, polygon, autodesk

Id: yQ6huO0AF8Q

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021