Secrets of Using Triangles for Modeling - Are they allowed?

hey guys heading immortan from flipping almost here and in today's video we are gonna be talking about triangles oh yeah and quads and when to use triangles and when not to use triangles so I don't know this is Piniella this has been something we've been talking about for many many years just hitting an eye and there seems to be this sort of I like to call it like the elitist of quads group around that you live and die by you can only have quads in your in your mesh and hopefully with this video we can sort of clarify some of those viewpoints like as to when to use them when they're good to use and when you can totally use triangles and your models aren't gonna suffer in any way from from using them so in general let's try to avoid triangles yeah like we're not what we're trying to advocate in this video here is note we're not talking about bad modeling practices like having triangles like if let's say you're teaching a class which we've been doing like I have to state try to avoid using triangles because that's good practice like if you new to modeling and all that it's good practice to avoid triangles but once you get more into it and you get more advanced you realize that it's it's all it's a little bit more fine than that yeah the point is a bit more gray it's not just black and white no it's really it's more of a shade of gray here and I think that especially when you're especially if you're teaching new students telling them to don't use triangles is an excellent approach because they'll have that sort of ingrained in them like okay I'm not supposed to use triangles I should try and do everything with quads and you know you give them the chance cuz you can totally do everything in quotes if you wanted to this helmet here we've pre messed it up for you now but this this helmet was actually an exercise in that I just forgot you're looking at this Helms like okay let's find some triangle it turns out there wasn't really in trying but was fine - or something yes I'm hearing there it was an exercise and trying to keep things quoted Justin just to you know exercise the mind I guess um but there are definitely use cases where triangles will just save you hours of work instead of having to try and reroute things to still make up perfect quads and once you sort of it's like I think it's like with anything that we do once you know the basics and once you know the rules then you can start breaking them there and we really seen this lot of like what more saloon can before that you know he had teachers who's told you never use triangles and then people always just assume that they assume that to be the gospel is you never deviate from that ever so you've been modeling for years and you're like I can I can use triangles yeah you can totally use triangles I've heard some arguments against such as our render engines don't support triangles that I've never seen that I've never seen in any case that I render and her game engine wouldn't support it and you had a good note about that yeah so all thing you do here is triangles anyway like under the hood everything is converted to triangles here so anything of course it would support it because it supports it the the thing about trying the thing about triangles is like the if you think about it okay from just math point of view and we don't know math no all right oh okay so we have we have a point which is vertex we have two points connect those twos now we have an edge then you have three points now you have a face the lowest number of points you can have to have a face as a triangle so obviously triangles are supported because that's how things work like everything is triangles it's not displayed as triangles here and right you know you see a quad there are four connection points but at render time it's not like the render engine is like gonna mess up your mesh by triangulating it and then subdividing it it's just everything is connected by trying yes so for sure so we'll show some examples now of where it can make sense to have triangles in these examples here there there's no great modeling guys was that great modeling for showing where to have no you know but it's just showing how a shape can be retained yeah so these two pieces look identical can you guess which one has triangles mmm maybe the both may be nice to do so this one over here I sort of messed it up a little bit super nice this is what it looked like so we have random triangles here that don't even make any sense but it's just a I like the fact that you can still retain the shape perfectly fine even on a curved surface yeah if you have enough you know resolution around it to support the shape so it's not like I mean this shape is just a veil as valid as the shape I give ever give this to anyone and they would render it it's gonna look fine yeah so if the reason you might want to use triangles and examples of left here obviously it doesn't make sense in this specific case you decide to use some Peaks actual examples here is that if if let's say it was twice as fast a model we have we have a lot of cases where you can speed up your modeling significantly by adding us there's a single triangle sometimes you need to terminate a loop somewhere and by if you can't add if you can't find a good place to terminate loop you'll just add it across the entire bloody model and it just makes everything heavier it takes time and it's not worth it I've worked on a very number of films now and characters and creatures were filmed and I can guarantee you that all of them because I've touched them everybody but somewhere you sneaky little triangle yeah they're just they're just not visible to you yeah so a quick example wanted to show you here is again it's actually it's tricky with hard surface because if you have a flat surface on a hard surface object then triangles kind of become irrelevant depending on what's gonna happen to it further down the pipe um if it's something that you have to sculpt on and smooth to try to get some smooth shapes that gets tricky with triangles their quads are much easier to resolve to sort of like even things out if it's just something like this obviously you know so this site looks nice this site doesn't but the triangles here don't actually again affect the surface and in any way no up here you can see that there's there was a triangle like up here and I wanted to retain the shape a little better so you just add a loop so that gives us a quad instead but both of these are again they're equally valid this one just retains the shape a little better because you know I needed it to yeah so I added it so it became a chord also a general note modeling something this is really hard like these kind of shapes are inserting inserting cylinders into curved surface and keeping it clean this is one of the trickiest things I know how to model it is so hard like this entire helmet took me a month to do I mean I'm not a very proficient hard surface modeler I do it occasionally and I doubt it like keep up to date sometimes just so I don't forget how to do it but it's tricky and also because it's it's it's a low it's a it's as low pretty much of this si can go while still retaining the shape yeah so this is also where if you can indict triangles to speed up the work and resolve really hard shapes go for it yeah the same thing here I saw just we just merged some of these these edges here to make some triangles and again the it retains the shape just fine yeah you can see there's enough of it goes through in the recording but you can see there's a little bit of weird wobbliness going on here and that would probably be the reason why okay don't have triangles there but like we said we've also placed the triangles in super weird place yes this is not how you would do we're trying us now another example is when it comes to people and we had a long discussion with someone about this yesterday just like trying to figure out and trying to explain the best ways to deal with triangles on on something like a person yeah and there are plenty of places where you can hide i angle on a person and there are plenty of use cases for when you want to want to have a triangle it's like the most common ones it's like if you want to add more resolution and things just will take I don't know half an hour an hour or something to resolve better if you have quads put it in the nostrils like in here you know you're you're you're always extruding the nostrils of these aren't extruded very far up but you would always extrude them up like a good ways yeah it's always dark in there anyway plus there's nothing that deforms know if you have deforming nostrils on the inside like you have a very special build so as a general thing when it comes to like triangles try to avoid them where there is high level of deformation yeah like that you really want that to be most or you want that to be awkward if there are high-level information keep it quality but if it's not like areas you can hide them in insert the mouth instead of the ear the nostril the eyes on the top of the head the scalp there unless your scalp is gonna be moving a lot I mean for if for like this model here we're working as short legs first you would have hair on but then results my helmet I'm covering the entire thing like you're not gonna see it at all so if you if you could simplify the topology drastically on the body by having a few triangles on the head yeah you know knock yourselves out yeah so if you wanted to one thing we're looking at let's say you in this case let's say you wanted to add resolution just here right you wanted my can be hard sometimes yeah there yeah that's actually a good example X would you it goes all the way around because let's say in this case you just want to resolution on the on the top of the top eyelid but you can see the loop when all the way around here yeah which now actually makes everything harder and and you could extrapolate this to to the body where I here like this was this was just around this region but maybe you're adding a loop on around the nose which goes into the toes yeah that is all connected so sometimes that's just that just simplifies it so much for having this batting a triangle in an area like that yeah like okay so this part here you know her hairline would probably be just around this mark maybe you'd want to extend it up yeah probably extend this up a little bit so you could add so you wanted to add a loop that went all the way up here from here then you could terminate it here no and that would be fine it wouldn't affect anything no anywhere so the counter-arguments we know people are gonna be making now is that you could have easily made that little thing there into a quad up here you're like you could have just sent the center off you could have easily made it into court but the point is that if yeah then that would have looked a bit nicer maybe yes what'd you get it on you get it on that yeah and now you have a quote that terminates but let's say you were only allowed to add yeah a loop or some yeah and it's looking so who cares if it looks nice like this here isn't an aesthetic exercise technology is a technical thing here yeah so if it technically works and if you can speed up your work quite a bit by adding a triangle on the scalp which is gonna be carved by hair a cloth or even if it's not let if it's a bold person doesn't matter it's not going to deform you know it's gonna have heavy sculpting up there and you can simplify it so much like if you wanted to get rid of resolution here let's pretend that one's also gone hmm so you could get rid of the resolution there exactly and then now you have a triangle here and again it's not it's a triangle that's a place where no one is gonna see it but my guess more importantly it's a place where there's not gonna be any deformation yeah oh actually think you didn't yeah like you have like I don't have scalp control up there if your muscles are here yeah and here and you have here so the deformation that happens up here is negligible yeah and also because it's most likely likely just gonna be surface sliding yeah so that's fine but like having said if you want to add more stuff and you could hide it in here what in the part the butchy under the feet as well you never even had deformation under the feet and like it's really tricky like when you're adding for is a toast to a model here that you just can't figure out how to blend them because you know the toast they're like hands in in complexity which we all know is super hard so in this case they were solved quite nicely but a lot of times it's just not gonna do that you know ideally listen let's say we live in an elitist quad world yeah maybe we would want to get rid of these directional changes again but is like where do you stop yeah under the tokus you can easily I've seen this so many times where you you're you're adding a loop on you actually try the commuters Ida loop to the toe here I look around here so just like adding a loop and see how far it goes like that which goes all the way across the body you see how far it goes yeah you see how CR everything is connected now doing this excellent that goes all the way over to and yeah cuz it goes so the way this the logic foods going to go is it goes through here yeah and it would go through this toe because there's a directional change there and it goes all the way up here it would probably go around there and then up yeah it goes crazy like so so the point here is you're adding a little loop to the toe which will now go all across the body and this is going crazy so sometimes adding a little cheeky triangle down there like specific areas like we said inside of the mouth in general cavities eyes under there under the feet yeah Jen just general areas with low level of deformation like hands probably wouldn't be a good place to have no angles because you have so much deformation in the hands yeah everywhere even in between the fingers you might be able to get away with it in between the fingers but I probably would never I know like like one bit clearer we're not for like just go crazy and high triangles everywhere like I saw now try to avoid them this is not like a nihilistic future where no one knows what happened to the triangles yeah so yeah with that said let's jump into ZBrush and just have a quick look at something so first off so we prepped the loop and let me sometimes do the eagle-eyed viewer might have spotted that we also had triangles on the arm oh my god I know that's very intentional this is not part of the actual model because this is a place where you shouldn't of triangles no and especially this kind of shape this cylindrical round chip again it's like it's something that round it deforms and that becomes tricky so if you were to subdivide this now you see we're having a little bit of an issue with stuff going on it's not gonna affect our sculpting in here like that that's going to look completely fine because zebras just cares about resolution but once we start to go in and smooth it yeah this is what what happens is it announced to poles and spikes like use alt smooth to get it to get a better result on there but it's not ideal know that it's really not the best way to go about this so anywhere that that is deforming where you know you're gonna be sculpting and smoothing you probably shouldn't use triangles that's why I like it's a good practice to stay quads because that sort of like just protects you and and you know that your model is gonna work in most cases where whatever you do but sculpting inside the nostrils or inside the ears that's not happening not really the same here in the eyes actually I think maybe we did yeah I think we we hit some triangles in here as well and that's completely irrelevant yeah like triangles don't matter in there no I don't think we want to talk about as well is this is something I don't think a lot of people in certainly know that once you subdivide a model it becomes quartz yeah like if you have if you have a bunch of triangles and you subdivide them they actually just become ports I think we have a prep cube here so if we do preview smooth like oh that looks nothing like a lying mr. flip normals smooth it you can see we now have perfect what yeah this is just through the magic of subdivision so we want to say that this is not how you resolve it like you shouldn't just have tons of Kronik triangles oh no and then just go smooth close your eyes and be like it's done now but it is if you know how this works yeah you can use this to you can use this to your advantage that like if you're a beginner I would I wouldn't recommend I add in triangles and just move on yet but if you are if you're an advanced modeler you can because then you know how to you can predict this then you're probably not maybe you are just for the pure controversy talking about triangles another thing is in guns Oh hold it turn into quality as well even with a nice directional change yeah oh my god again don't use this as a guide how to model because you shouldn't be modeling like that no and actually when it comes to in guns that's what we were gonna show here when you and work within guns which you should never ever do this is what happens when you've got imported into ZBrush so look at our helmet up here I made a little I made a doodoo I was a very cheeky Thank You doodoo so I'm here see I actually just I terminated a triangle here so that gives us five sides definitely I do definitely do you and then you know in my wisdom I try to import and in ZBrush and this is what we get Oh can't deal with more than four sides so it'll actually auto triangulate that area so if we go up here there's a display error here but there you go so it's actually added triangles to sort of try and resolve that area just because ZBrush doesn't deal with anything above four sides you run into the issue with in Mudbox as well it's like a collection of virtual is like c8 yeah if Mudbugs has too much - if the density off of the star is too high yeah yeah doesn't also send the density of the star he's talking about 3d modeling here but if the density off like um like a pole is too high in Mudbox it will just go crazy yeah so it's one of the problem with this though if you're looking at this me like so what's the problem and just turn into and just turn into a triangle to here right and that that's fine things it's not fine if you are in a production or in just general vert order is important and this is something that we actually want to make a video on in the future and it's gonna be so exciting it's gonna be super exciting so vert order is super important it is one of these things nobody really understands people pretend to do and they throw the term divert daughter has changed it like what do you mean by that regardless of the point is that you actually changing the model now so if you if you take you take the model from Maya it's all modeled you take it into ZBrush now and take it back it's no longer the same model even if it's at lowest subdivision levels yes you have blend shapes or if you have that dependency between the models they're not gonna be working like you just screwed up like crazy if you're in a production now because you had an angle yeah so n guns by themselves if you're sticking Tamiya aren't really a problem like a mortal ISKCON we're so perfectly fine in my if you have that if you have a flat surface if you have a having I'm gone that's fine so if you know what you're doing and you know you order your only person is ever gonna be touching this model here I'm guns are okay and also just let me clear and gone as Hollywood morning for four points yeah so that's like a five sided or more yeah so but the problem is that at least if you're in production of any sort like even if it's a small advertisement whatever it is things you don't necessarily know what this model is gonna be used for so as an example here we often have a hard surface models which of course you never take them to see versus hard surface but then you have damage variance you have like this giant robot or whatever much you'd be doing wonder we're like were you from so you have a disjoint robot it gets smashed up by some giant creatures you need to do a lot of damage for exact lord morton's doing now so you do all this damage in ZBrush here because see brush is fantastic for that you need to make sure that you model supports ZBrush I think this is really important you just need to make sure that your model can be used here cuz if you don't and you you take it in here you don't know what's up you just you know that the model you're exporting from ZBrush is no longer the same as the one in Hannah Maya yeah because now you've all of a sudden let's say you have one end gone now you've added an extra edge in your model yes and then whoever is rigging your stuff is gonna just gonna kill you yeah because explode I think this is also just as a quick thing this is a good way to show no messed up it can be with with triangles like okay now I've done a damage variant right now but as you see I'm trying to smooth this out and I can go in there again with alternate smoothed if I try to resolve it better and it does resolve better but resolving this if it's just pure quads just makes your life a lot easier so for us for the people who haven't seen our ultimate smooth video how do you do ultra smooth okay so I have to do it in order to do it hold down shift to smooth you start smoothing and then you let go of shift yeah and that'll give you the alternate smoothing algorithm the alternative smooth is fantastic for specifically it's kind of things here we did a video for how to do alternate smooth we kind of were like okay we have to find an example this actually makes sense poles is where it makes sense yeah so if you have DARS if you have a bit of a change in subject here you have a nipple and you have a bunch of triangles on nipple this is an example where like it not because it's a nipple but because it's a pole like it's a collection of things find a bunch of stuff and I really missed this up you know I this is this is how to not model a 20-18 so trust us we know how to model buttonless so look at this when ice just smooth regularly this is what happens but with alternate smooth we can sort of like try to resolve that a little better but you see it's still not super good because of the collection of triangles so it'll make your life easier to not use triangles in these areas definitely there is there is one place where you could always use triangles it's like it's like with the nostrils mm-hmm in here where things collect them you know yeah the same thing goes with with this like you've done it's like a bolt but it has a flat top whether that's quoted or or it's triangles that that doesn't really really doesn't matter no you could have that and that would be the same exact result yeah yeah so just to sum up this flu rant I know you're super bored of talking if hearing is ranting about triangles now so try to not use them as a general it's not as a humanist as a general thing try to avoid using triangles but where it makes sense to do them and where you can hide them if you can speed up the work quite a bit and your model becomes cleaner because of it which is kind of almost like an oxymoron like you but adding triangles to model becomes cleaner like we looked at the forehead or the scalp here where the model would actually become cleaner by adding even though it looks Messier yeah because there is a big difference between what how the computer reads cleanliness and how your eyes do it our eyes are like all we need order and everything computer is more forgiving than hat yeah so obviously we have n guns here but use triangles where it makes sense I don't design goals it's it's a it's a tricky thing to you know figure out sometimes and there's a bunch of questions I think there's gonna be more specific questions okay so what about this exact situation can I use it there I think it's just like where you think it makes sense and feel free to to post screenshots in the YouTube comments as well we'd love to see where like maybe creative use this or off it or just like general questions yeah we're more than happy to answer that yeah Oh as a final note I think I just I just I just have thought about something don't use triangles in something like this mmm so right here you can see that in the other side you know here it made sense with the triangles that's purely because this semi flat surface there's a little bit of curvature in it this surface however has a lot of curvature in it yeah so you know if I were to add some triangles here first of all it's just pure silliness but it starts to not resolve very nice you can see now we start to get this weird sort of artifacting in there so that would be a good example of what you shouldn't yeah when we prepped of this video now we actually learning something which I guess we can actually do now let's just try triangulate the entire model so if you go to a mesh and triangle eight hoop you get the triangles and everything so this is this is this is like a preview of what it kind of looks like under the hood yeah but it's not actually like if you guys if you subdivide the model and I would smooth the model you can see that everything goes crazy like this is why we don't have triangle therefore this area looks kind of okay but areas with more extreme curvature yep that's where triangles but also therefore like if you unsubscribe that model again the model looks the same in this yeah so if you're doing low poly modeling for games you know we're that we're you don't actually subdivide a model they're gonna look the same yeah so if you particularly if you aren't subdividing the model like if you are working with with the real-time assets knock yourselves out like then when the key things here is that it is actually being subdivided like smooth subdivide it like I'm not I'm not entirely up to up to scratch on the literature for game two triangle use it in games because that's not really what we focus on but it is it is more used yeah and do you know you terminate things is not going to subdivide yeah I would imagine that still deformable areas good yeah maybe I don't know some game people chime in on this because you didn't know a lot more than what yeah we'd love to hear your thoughts if they're from a game others yeah so I guess with all that said about man I was like half an hour he's talking about triangles and tents but yeah thank you guys so much for watching and if you want to see more videos about triangle sink leave a comment down below like and subscribe thanks you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 24,160

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials, triangles, modeling tutorial

Id: jvSI0YaAUmw

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018