SUBD vs. NGON modeling - which is the right choice?

what's up guys this tutorial is going to be all about sub d and quad modeling techniques i feel like i don't hammer it enough on my channel it's still very important and i want to make sure people don't overlook it uh the reason sub d and quad modeling techniques is so focused on is because it wasn't until recently that we were able to start using advanced normal manipulation techniques to fix shading and actually use n-gons in our workflow i'm going to talk about the entire subject i've been using blender like almost 10 years now and i have a pretty good um understanding of all the different workflows so i just want to teach sub d and quad modeling in this video and discuss exactly why it's a bit over hyped nowadays still incredibly important but in the close to 10 years i've been using blender i'm 22 now started using it when i was 14. a lot has changed and we're going to discuss all that in this video and why ngon workflow is very practical nowadays but um i can't there's so much to talk about i'm just going to start modeling so let's um i might even make this into a simple game asset i don't know so let's start with like a high poly block out so i'm going to make a very very simple asset using boolean sub surf workflow quad workflow re-topo literally the whole nine yards so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go through this kind of quickly by the way because i really want to be able to focus on the topic at hand so i don't want to spend time you know saying press s to scale this and that so if you're like a complete beginner maybe skip this video because i might go a bit fast but most of you should be able to follow along with them what i'm doing here so back in the day when i first started using blender this was how you had to do everything it was all blocking things out running loop cuts running sub d and that was just that was just the way to go and as i kind of block this thing out what i really want to talk about is why sub d modeling is not as important anymore don't get me wrong for organics and subsurf modeling techniques sub d's and quads are like the only way but um the reason sub d was so focused on for however long 3d modeling has been around you know 20 potentially 30 years was weighted normal techniques to handle n-gons and bad shading were not introduced until very recently it's a very new concept maybe not concept but a new implementation into blender at least so the only way to actually get good results with good shading and have a good flowing mesh was to use quads and sub surf there was no way to drop a way to normal on get clean shading it was just a mess right and uh that's that's why a lot of people why a lot of experts focused so heavily on the sub d workflows because there weren't a lot of shading management techniques back in the day it wasn't until 2.8 was released that shading management and weighted normal techniques were actually implemented so back when i started using blender i was doing subd quad modeling for five six years so this is actually what i'm most familiar with believe it or not because uh hard surface workflow is still being you know heavily advanced now built upon rather so without me you know going on too much of a rant here we're gonna do everything so let's say i wanted to run a bevel right here okay just a very simple bevel maybe i wanted this area rounded and this area rounded right i wanted something like that so in my usual workflow that i generally teach on my channel usually we would just come in here drop a bevel with ctrl b and we would just you know add in a quite a few segments let me apply the scale and drop on my screencast keys yeah we'd uh we would come in here control b run a bevel give it a good amount of segments and obviously if this was a game asset we can re-topo later on down the line generally i'd give this like an odd number of segments in here it's like nine or something and that's how we would get our bevel we would run a sharpen right run a sharpen if it doesn't quite pick up where you want you just have to maybe adjust the auto smooth angle and it's still not picking up all the way you know there's a lot of things you could do to kind of get this cleaner but yeah for the most part this is how we do it we come in here run a physical bevel we'd sharpen get you know sharps in there run a small little bevel adjust the angle a bit and kind of play around with it and this is how we would get our hard surface look to it in this case i should probably be using a weight limit method there yeah it's a little bit better and yeah that's that's what we would do and if we wanted to improve the shading we'd come in here alt click on sharpen or you could simply just run a way to normal and the day has been saved and we wouldn't necessarily even need this geo right here we could literally turn all these areas into an ngon because we're not running sub d there's not there's no issue having the n gone there it's just saving geo and oftentimes giving a better result so why have extra geo on a flat surface when you can just make it into an n gone with the usual hard surface modeling techniques so that's what i usually teach very normal and shading focused but if you were to do this with a sub d approach you'd have to approach this very very differently reason being is because imagine we ran a sub d on so many segments it's going to get really dense and right now it's probably going to collapse because we have an n gone right here but you know my point still stands we're going to have a pretty heavy mesh in here the more sub d's we add especially on that bevel so if you're actually doing sub d pure sub d quad modeling the actual approach for the bevel around here would be something completely different what i would recommend doing instead is running a bevel with nowhere near this many segments i would actually go for like you know two segments only because that's going to be more than enough and then the nice thing about this is since we're running sub d we have to make sure we are free of n-gon so that way it subdivides properly you can get away with subdividing flat surfaces i still prefer to re-topple it so in this case since we only have a few segments on the bevel here it's super easy to come in and turn this area into quads right we just add a loop there j key to join um we'll join this up and then maybe i'll just symmetrize to the other side to save time and now we have is literally a mesh completely full almost completely full of quads let's get the bottom as well and remember if it's symmetrical save your time run a symmetry if you're not using hard ops you can just come in here mesh and then symmetrize it's going to be positive x to negative x other way around and then you're going to have the same exact result so now we have a mesh full of quads so the bevel we only have a few segments here which means whenever i run a sub surf now it's not going to get super super dense like i just showed you on the a hard surface example with the several segments on the bevel so what i'm going to actually do is press ctrl 2 maybe control and we're going to shade it smooth now in subsurf modeling techniques there's not really any normal manipulation we're working with so rarely where you ever need to have the auto smooth option turned on unless you're doing like an organic hard surface mesh turn that guy off you're not going to really need it and then what you would essentially do you'd come in here maybe give this a small little bevel and you still have quads as you can see give this area a small little bevel let's do the same thing for the bottom and now we kind of have a nice defined edge right here if you're doing stylized props this is probably one of the best approaches because stylize has this really nice more organic looking meshes to it and this is how you would approach it and see now since we only have those two segments for that bevel setting if we go into wireframe and take a look you can see the whole mesh is roughly even it's not super dense in one corner sub d by default increases the resolution heavily there's no need to do it off the bat before you run a sub d so that's why you always want to start with a relatively low poly mesh defining the form and then run your sub d so in this case a really small bevel is fine the other nice thing about these small bevels is like i showed you here it's really easy to re-topologize there's not too many vertices to work with you can imagine if we had like 10 bevel segments we'd have to add in a lot more loop cuts to turn everything into quads big big waste of time big mistake i see people make so you just need a very small amount and you can retar read apologize really easily another important fundamental in sub d modeling is the use of creasing now creasing is pretty similar to proximity loops you know how you add in a loop and you can kind of tighten up the mesh a bit creases do roughly the same thing not always with the best results but you can use creasing to pretty much do the same effect but without without having to increase the mesh density because creases don't require any extra geo we would just come in here for example let's say i wanted to crease this area to kind of give a nice definition around the side what i would do is press shift e give it just a not too much of a crease you don't want to go too high to one if i use the one i'm usually doing my usual hard surface technique so maybe like i don't know 0.5 0.6 yeah 0.6 is fine and now we have is a nice defined area on the smash it's probably a bit too high actually drop that down to like .3 and go a bit higher now obviously it's always going to be a nice result if you were to just straight up adding a proximity loop it's going to be super defined in that way but creases are a nice way to kind of handle topology where it might not be so easy to run a proximity loop people have all these different like rules for creasing and some of them apply honestly i run creases where they work it's as simple as that if a crease doesn't work in the situation i want it to if the shading's off i don't use it if a crease works over a proximity loop i run a crease it's that easy people like to over complicate creases from what i've seen it's it's use it when you need it type of thing so in this case i don't actually like the result because if i go too high too much shading warps you could of course increase this to like control four but there's no need to go that high maybe if you're baking in this case it might be a better idea to simply use no crease and perhaps just um you know run a proximity loop here that might be a better idea kind of all up to you but now we have is this really nice sub d defined hard surface mesh where we're not using any physical bevels no bevel modifiers no way to normals no end guns pure sub d and quad techniques down here let's drop in a proximity loop to kind of tighten that area up and you could also try using a crease here it's probably going to be horrible shading if i were to guess to a certain extent in these areas especially i would not recommend using creases just uh sub d proximity loops is usually a much better solution so yeah we have a pretty defined mesh here another thing i want to point out whenever you're running booleans usually in my hard surface workflow with normal techniques we don't have to worry about the n-gons present in the mesh i run a boolean i run a bevel modifier i won't run a way to normal to solve the shading errors and i'm good to go no need to re-topologize no need to use quads in this case though if we run a boolean here in the middle for example let me actually um you could do flat shading or i guess it doesn't matter but let's say for example i let's turn this off i want to run like a boolean cut here in the front right we'll just kind of cut this in right there in the middle and just to make sure this thing is completely even we'll just symmetrize to the other side all right so we're gonna have to run a mirror because it's a live boolean we'll do that okay and now we have is a boolean cut here and obviously we have n-gons all around that boolean cut like i said you're doing my method you just run a bevel modifier wait a normal modifier you're good to go i'll even show you right here if i were to remove the sub d i could just you know drop on my good old bevel drop on a heart of normals and there you go i don't care about those n-gons there because it's on a flat surface the shading has mostly been fixed and you're good to go so that's how i'd usually do it but with our sub d modifier this is not going to work very well especially if we add like the boolean up here it's just going to collapse on itself see that just not going to work so what do you think we need to do here i'll give you a guess we're going to have to re-topologize of course so in this case what i think i'm going to do i'm just going to remove the subdue for now we're going to apply this boolean right and re-topologizing is super easy when you're doing your boolean cuts on meshes you plan to sub d it's important to make sure that your n-gone cuts are read to apologize a bull what i mean by that is in your bullying cuts don't go crazy right don't like run a ton of bevels right here just keep it a hard edge and that way we have plenty of space to kind of re-topologize this thing i'm kind of going on a spiel here so let me just show you so here's our n-gons right if we want to turn everything into quads to use sub-d it's super easy let me oops let me dissolve that out and this is going to be not a big deal at all we'll come in we're going to join this up into a quad this area can be joined up into a quad let me get rid of that and it's just kind of a game of playing with your topology right some areas you might need to reroute edge loops and get a different effect this you could join in like that and it wouldn't really be an issue you could also depending on how you're working join something like this depends on how you want to you know route everything in your mesh but i'm just going to stick with this because that way my edge routing is going to yield this type of result and it's not going to go all the way across and at the end of the day like i said it's all about getting a result that looks good there's no set rules per se i guess it depends on what you're doing um what else do we have we definitely have a big end gone here and there so to fix that up we're gonna drop a loop here and we can just kind of you know estimate this you don't have to be perfect with it what i want to do is join these up let's move that down a bit and never ever ever waste time doing the same thing on a symmetrical mesh because like i have said you just come in here and you drop a symmetry and you don't have to waste time let me go ahead and see what else we have an n gone right here no problem i kind of just symmetrize the wrong side but no big deal we have that okay it looks like we have an n gone here so most practical loop would be through that area join that up join this up and then symmetrize there we go and the best way to check for n-gons that you might not see off the bat is to go to select and then select all by trait faces by sides and you can do greater than four and in this case we don't have any n-gons now so people like to get scared from booleans and subsurf and it's not that hard right you run the boolean then you look at the mesh and you think okay how can i turn this set of n-gons into a set of quads then you use like a combination of loop cuts the j key and knife cuts and you can get quads really easily it's not that difficult just kind of depends on your experience with edge routing topology management that's just things that take time usually you'll you'll develop an eye over time for where to connect things up okay so now what we have is a pretty basic mesh we have a boolean cut in the middle a lot of people would actually try to model this manually straight from quads there's no need do the boolean first to retypologize after going to save you so much time you can come in drop our subserve smooth it out this looks pretty good we're going to need to of course kind of tighten things up so maybe we'll pull that down um that's not going to really give the result i want we'll do something like this if you want to make this a bit more like a wedge you could of course do something like that probably a bit more geo than you really need you could also kind of play with the creasing here so if you want to play the game of creasing we could come in here and select this area and you know play with the creasing this is what i mean like when you don't need to use proximity loops you can usually play with creasing and get pretty decent effects the only issue is sometimes creasing will get you some shading distortions and it's kind of up to you how much those actually bother you and there we go we do have some pinching here in the corners let me go ahead and go into wireframe and take a look we can also kind of tighten this up a bit pull that in and that's kind of why i chose this corner connection points because otherwise the loop would have been running all the way through here and not actually around so it's also kind of a matter of playing with topology and getting a result that runs your loops the way you want them to be ran it's kind of a difficult concept to explain this i'm not really a fan of we have a poll here and you you know how polls go so in that case it's like do you want to have a poll here or do you want to have a loop that might not carry around like you want so if this pole bothered you for example you could easily swap that out by let's see i don't want it to run like that so maybe what i'll do is dissolve these out join that up and that's going to run through there oops my mistake i forgot to dissolve that one out because obviously if you have quads loops can run through quads but if you kill the quad the loop's going to stop and that's kind of what we want in this case so to avoid that pinching because of you know if you have a vertex with more than four edges going into it you have a pole and that's usually going to cause pinching with the sub d so an easy way to fix that is to run it like i showed you before this is technically going to yield another pole one two three four five it's not going to be as noticeable though or as big of a deal and you'll see why in a second join this up join this up and we're just going to symmetrize i know i'm going a little bit quick but i really want to focus on these types of techniques so what we had before was a connection from here to here connection from here to here which was causing pinching in this corner but now like i said the loop won't actually be running around this square it will be running through but the benefit of this is we don't have any pinching right here and if i turn the subsurf back on absolutely no pinching in that area so that's another issue people run into they they have pinching right and that's simply because you probably have a pull somewhere i'm going to pull that down yeah it's not too bad of a result as you can see i don't want to go too heavy on this tutorial i really want to focus on the concepts here i'm going to select a face on the top shift g and then coplanar i'm going to inset and then do i want to extrude down or extrude up maybe we'll do that and set again extrude down kind of play with the tightness on this one just kind of a fun little sub d mesh so as i kind of go through this model i hope you're starting to piece together the different workflow how dramatically different the subsurf and quad workflow is from the usual bevel weighted normal and gone workflow there's one thing i really want to focus on i'm going to take a second here to not model and just talk and it's the fact that uh the reason so many people are so sub-d obsessed is because one they need something for their work maybe it's a different software that i'm not familiar with that requires quads to actually function well or perhaps they're just not used to the new normal management techniques that are just recently been developed in the past few years bottom line you can use n-gons in your workflow all the time even for game assets the reason people say good topology quads for game assets is because one they're using a program that needs those quads i can tell you right now unreal substance and blender fine with n-gons no problem just triangulate other software i cannot speak for but uh yeah the reason people are using sub surfing quads so much and really hammering it for game assets and a lot of you are interested in game assets is simply because a lot of the techniques i teach are pretty new techniques and they don't know how to work them properly you can use n-gons in your workflow all the time on hard surface projects i promise you does not matter the issue is figuring out good triangulations and unwrapping and that's just going to have to be a topic for another video i really wanted to show just the general sub d workflow how you would approach it from this and how you would approach it from a more hard surface and gone standpoint and i guess before we close off this video i want to show you kind of how i would approach a similar object in my workflow right in the heart of normal way to normal workflow whatever so this is our sub d mesh and obviously if you wanted to use this as a game asset you would just have to optimize it a bit you'd probably duplicate it remove the sub surf and just kind of clean up the unnecessary geo nothing difficult there but anyways back to the workflow i would usually do so here's just a block out right here nothing crazy so if we were running sub d obviously these n-gons over here on the side would not fly we would have to re-topologize that get it into quads so that way it subdivides fine but in the bevel way to normal workflow we don't need that because bevel does not care about n-gons at all so in this case we can actually save some geo by turning this into one big ngon and to get these nice bevels like we have on the subsurf example what we would do is simply come in here and literally run a bevel with control b maybe like 10 segments or so depends on how clean you want it to be we'll do that i don't like the sharps on the ends of the bevel because you can see them so usually what i do is i come in here get rid of those quite easy actually and then to get that nice rounded edge effect like we have here on the subsurf example we would simply use a bevel modifier which once again bevel modifiers do not care about n-gons or bad topology whereas subsurf models do so in this case we're just gonna drop on our bevel looks like the bevel isn't um quite to reach in this area so we'll press the a key and hard ops to adjust the angle all that's doing is changing the angle size to actually catch those edges right there and it doesn't look like it's quite catching what i want it ends right here then it collapses so instead what i'm going to do is use a limit method set to weight so that way i can define the sharper edges to be the ones getting beveled and what do we have here we have a pretty annoying shading artifact which can be fixed quite easily i'm not going to use heart of normals but i'm going to use a weighted normal instead so way to normal like i said back in the day before way to normal is a thing you would have awful shading which is why everyone wants the subsurf route because quads and subsurf you can't go wrong if you have quads you have good shading usually unless you have a pole right but now that we have these way to normals techniques it's so much less necessary because if you have a bad shading issue drop on away to normal and you're good to go so we have that pretty similar to this effect for the bottom i mean it looks really similar right now by default any sort of sub surf mesh is going to have a more organic look to it because of how it subdivides but these two are pretty similar to each other i honestly prefer these types of effects because it looks more hard surface now for the cut in the middle well what do we do not a problem we'll come in here and do a similar cut as a matter of fact i just reuse this cutter move it over here and we'll run a difference boolean let's just mirror to the other side to keep it nice and consistent how big was it it was make this a bit bigger okay and then we'll do our usual stuff to fix that shading we'll just sharpen it and no we don't need to sharpen it what we need to do is apply the boolean here so that way we can mark these areas as a bevel weight and there we go so although we have n-gons right here doesn't really matter because we're not using sub surf and the shading looks fine i also prefer this because to get a nice uniform effect and a nice bevel around it on the subsurf example we'd have to go in and add more proximity loops and play with creases and it's just annoying whereas on this one it's pretty much good out of the box as you can see so yeah i mean we have ngons right here but it doesn't matter at all as a matter of fact doesn't matter at all because the shading looks good and like i said weighted normal and normal management techniques are brand new pretty much it came in 2.8 so just the past few years it's been a thing and without weight of normal you can imagine already how difficult getting a clean result would be with n-gons compared to the usual quad sub-d workflow but with the addition of way to normals new additions and enhancements to bevel modifiers and just working with n-gons in general sub-d is so much less important nowadays because we can do pretty much everything sub-d can do but without the hassle of having perfect quads and also without the hassle of having to re-topologize everything these two are pretty darn close and once again like i said sub d always is going to give a more organic look and if you want a more organic look maybe sub d is the right route for you but these are these are pretty similar right i didn't do the top yet if i really wanted to i could just inset and not to mention that your um your ngons in the top are a lot cleaner because well it just looks cleaner honestly that's my excuse it just looks cleaner that way whereas with our quad example it was okay just a bit messy in the top and just not really a fan you have to get in here and it's just annoying bevel techniques are a lot more defined and hard surface looking whereas subsurf techniques are good if you want that organic feel you need good topology for whatever reason you're simply used to that workflow or you're required to use that workflow whatever it may be sub d has its uses sub d and quad modeling is still very important but for the most part you can get away with ngon bevel way to normal modeling most of the time 99 of the time now in this workflow is easier more fun and it works and one more disclaimer none of these are the right answer it's it's simply the case it all depends on the situation if you're sculpting doing organics um zbrush for example you need quads there is no way around that certain softwares that i'm not familiar with that i won't speak on might require quads just because of how the software was coded i don't know but for the most part this workflow is going to work just fine and this workflow is going to work just fine it all depends on what you're doing and your goals and aspirations and whatever software you're using so hope this video gave some more insight to the subd workflow a little bit into using quads a little bit into using ngons and way to normal techniques and a little bit into retopologizing to give you like a full encompassing solution of both styles of modeling and hopefully this kind of gives you a better idea as to why i prefer this type of hard surface workflow so much and i think a lot of other people do is because you don't have to be as scared of ngons anymore people are always so scared of using n-gons but then they use the whole subsurf workflow and it just gets crazy for no reason at all and and ngons often times are going to be just fine for what you need anyways i'm gonna keep going on a spiel at this point thanks for watching if you want any more videos on this topic maybe some more in-depth looks game asset stuff i don't care whatever you want let me know in the description or yeah in the comments below not the description in the comments and i'll probably make a video on it so thanks a bunch guys catch you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 18,086

Keywords: blender, hard, surface, modeling, ngons, vs, quads, subd, subdivision, unwrapping, ngon, tutorial, beginner, game, asset, triangulate, which, is, the, right, choice, modelling, blenderbros, josh, gambrell

Id: IsubUPuRlgU

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021