To Quads or not to Quads? Well...

to quad or not to quad that is a question hey blend thebob here yeah to quad or not to quad it keeps coming again and again and again should their model be only quads triangles what about end guns and uh okay let's settle this once and for all the answer is it depends here we have three models they look exactly the same but they are completely different if I turn on the wireframe you will see why see the first one is the original one it comes from CAD data and it's been transferred into polygons from solid modeling and it's all triangle this one has been cleaned up using a disate modifier we'll see more about this later but it's full of Eng gon and this one is the all quads version well actually almost all quads now you may think that this one is much lighter right but if you look at it you see it's about 8,000 polygons for this one and if we look at the AL quad version it's 9,600 so it's not that much more there are two important things you need to consider if you want to decide should I go triangle or all quads if the model is going to be distorted or sculpted you need all quads if not you can use any of the two first models also the one in the middle will not work in the 3D painting software like marry it doesn't support end guns and I can guarantee you that if you need to send this to Houdini for simulation the Houdini people will not work with this triangulated model they need something very clean this is a no no no Miss models all quads no end gun but if you work in gaming the first one will work perfectly well because game engines only work in triangles the blender buub channel is about working in the VFX industry so let's continue this way all right so we have this shape here and we have two triangles we want to get rid of them while the easiest way to get rid of any triangles or end gun is to just subdivide it because when you subdivide it everything becomes a quad but you also quadruple the amount of polygon so you don't want that so this is what happens when you subdivide a vertex will be created in the middle of the polygon and will be connected to the middle of every edges so same thing here on the quad it would go from here to the edges so uh I'm not going to draw on all of them I added a modifier on all of them I'm just going to turn it on it's going to be easier this way so all this turn on the modifiers and you can see this is what it does this is something I actually talked about in my previous video about bevel inner Corners so you can go check it out so when you do a bevel like this you want to make sure that the outer here is at ARC so you can get a nice corner and now we get an end gun so we're just going to split this polygon here this one and this one here split same thing on the other side and now we get uh our nice bevel but we still have these two triangles here that we want to get rid of and now we have more lines in the ways so how can we fix that by the way I use my own Pine menus that I do with pine menu editor but these are the same tools that you use so knife is knife and loop tool is Loop tool the advantage is that when I go knife it's going to switch to edit more automatically for me same thing with Loop okay so let's cut this and this and here in the middle you can press shift to goes exactly in the middle and now I cut this all right uh let's delete these edges here so this one and this one here now I got two end guns here so uh we can easily fix that so we're going to go again with our knife tool and we're just going to connect to these triangles here and that's it they are all quads now this is a little bit too stiff so what I'm going to do is select the vertices from the inside side here all these that we created and I'm going to smooth them so I'm going to go in vertex and smooth vertices and uh I'm not too crazy about the result it's not what I wanted so let's do a little bit of manual work here I'm going to select this edge here and I'm going to select the other one here and I'm going to use Loop tools it's an add-on that comes with blender I don't know why it's not on by default but it's very useful so Loop tools and I'm going to go space and that's going to make the space between all the edges the exact same thing so let's try on these two so uh loop tool space yeah uh it's okay not too bad maybe I can do another one so uh let's try all of them again and uh let's try another ver vertex smooth just to see if it's going to be better now so vertex smooth and that's pretty much the best we're going to be able to do with this geometry I use an add-on called mes check and it's very good for finding all the triangles the end guns and everything that is wrong with your geometry uh the link is in the description check it out look at the monkey how messy it is so this add-on is really really useful to figure out what's wrong with the geometry when you work on a face on organic modeling or an animal whatever every riger will tell you everything needs to be quads we don't want any triangles on a face and you will get these uh vertices with five edges connected to it you cannot avoid it this is going to happen all the time everywhere on the geometry uh it's okay but try to place them at a place where there's not much Distortion so that it flows much better when you do all the shape keys for the face let's split this polygon here you will see that the faces will become yellow that's because they're going to be triangles so triangles are in yellow and end gun are in Red so let's cut this geometry here to create some end gun so T tck tck tck tck and now you can see they became red that's because they are end guns let me get more edges here so from here to here and from here to here and you see the vertex in the center just became red that's because there are more than five edges connected to this point so that should be avoided as much as possible but there are exceptions for example if you use an IU sphere then you don't have a choice that's the way they are so everything is connected to the center and if you do a planet the map will be set up to use an icosphere so you have to live with it but if you can avoid using iOS speres if it's not a planet if it's not a texture that can be wrapped around it well then I I suggest that you use a round Cube you can get this with the extra object add-on it comes with blender this also should be turned on by default so you go round Cube round Cube where is it uh round Cube and then you will get this thing here and if you play with a radius actually it's a cube but if you play with a radius you will eventually get a sphere and this is much easier to texture all the UVS are going to be uniform so it's it's a much better way to work here's another problem with the isos speres you cannot scul them properly because all the polygons have a different size so let's add a multi- resolution modifier on them and I will subdivide a few times now if I go into sculpt mode well on the side looks pretty good because the polygons are pretty much at the same size but if I go on the top here on the pole it's going to look very very crappy whoops where's my geometry it's back so let's go back into object mode and remove this you can see that we get all these lines here it's pretty bad if you used a cube sphere instead well you wouldn't have this issue what you don't believe me how dare you okay same thing here I'm going to subdivide a few times I'm going to smooth this I'm going to go into sculpt mode and I'm going to draw on it so la la la la you can see there are some poles here but they are very small and they will not affect the sculpt so now you will get a very very good result and that's why you don't want to use iOS speres but there are exceptions I spoke before about planets but also iOS speres are usually used for I balls also so just take your geometry here I'm going to do a little bevel just the tiny bevel two divisions then select the polygons that are in front and move them just a little bit forward and that's going to be my eyeball one thing that modelers often do to have quads everywhere is to delete one out of two edges when you have a pole like this so when you delete them you will end up with quads instead of triangles but if you take a look at it without the wireframe you will see that you get some artifacts here so we don't want that so in this case we want to keep the triangles but it will work very well on a cylinder so let me take the cap here I will just inser it a little bit and then I'm going to poke the face so you go in face poke poke poke poke here we go and now if I delete one out of two edges in this case it it will work very well because it's a flat surface and you will get quads that have about the same size as the other polygons so yeah it's a good way to do it but let me show you an even better way to fill the cap for cylinders especially if you have more polygons on the sides all right we're going to try with this one here I will select one out of two edges I will delete them and end up with quads so yeah we have quads but they're not very good quads and uh here on the edges I like to get very nice edges not like one out of two so there's a way to fix that and it's very easy and we're going to make it way much better what I'm going to do is take this and just inser them a little bit so like this and now I get clean edges everywhere and I can do it a second time here so that's better than what we had before but far from perfect because the quads are not very square or very elongated and uh not it's not a good idea so what can we do to fix it well I'm going to take the center and just delete it select the entire edge here and I'm going to go into faces and I'm going to do grid fill by the way in order for this to work you want to make sure that you have an even number of sides when you create your cylinder then I'm going to grow my selection not all the way to the end we want to keep one row of polygons and I'm going to go into the vertex menu and I'm going to go smooth polygons and then you can change the amount of smooth that you want and you see now I get something that's much better this can be sculpted it's going to work very well much better than if you do all the Tranquil crap okay this one here this one is all twisted this is an illegal polygon because you can see it looks like triangles that's because the render cannot deal with a shape that is that twisted and easy solution for that we're just going to add edge loops and you see the yellow circle in the center it's because I'm still in inset mode I don't know why but anyways so I'm going to add more divisions like this and now I get a proper geometry if you need to Bevel Corners like in here make sure that you have an even number of Divisions for your bevel so you get a nice quad in the corner if you have three here you cannot cut this and get a quad it's not going to work so if I try to connect this and this same thing vertically then I'm stuck with this weird end gun that I cannot deal with now let's see if we have four divisions in this case we can draw an edge here and to the corner so we get two quads other ways you could do this is like this but that's not very good because you get this corner here and the polygons don't have the same size same area so not very good you could try like this but it's still not perfect okay so let's try something we're going to take everything that's on this face here so I'm just going to select one face here and you can go select copl r and then it's going to select everything on the face and I'm going to inset it and now I get a nice Edge all the way around and now I can fix all these issues here so what happens if I try to smooth these vertices well it's not going to work well because you see it becomes all distorted and I need more resolution so I'm going to add retaining edges here is it going to work well let's give it a try retaining what retaining edges you see this Cube here with the bevels if I turn on a subdivision modifier it's not a cube anymore it's kind of bulgy so we don't want that so the idea of using retaining edges is that you add an edge very close to the bevel another one a little bit further away maybe one in the center and now if you turn on the subdivision modifier you get a perfect Cube that works problem is you don't have a nice distribution of the polygon so if you want to sculpt it it's not going to look good and if you want to distort it not as good either so you better do like this this is the exact same amount of division as the other one but everything is uniform if you ever give me a model with retaining edges you're going to do push-ups and that's the situation we have here here it's a very crappy model because there's not much we can do with this if we need to do anything special with it well you can see if I turned off the optimal display you can see the polygons are not uniform at all so if I sculpt it uh I will get this issue here everything is fine here but I come here and everything looks really really bad you've guessed it we're going to add an awful lot of Loops better but not perfect so it's still a bit Missy in the center so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to S this one select everything that is goanar I'm going to shring the the selection and then I'm going to do a smooth vertices so this way everything will be very well distributed you can change the level of subdivision to adjust it as needed now I got something that's workable and if I add a multi-res subdivision modifier then I can sculpt it and everything is going to be absolutely perfect now you may think that I need some bevels on the edge to keep them sharp no you don't screw the bevels just select the edges here and crease them so you can go here I'll put them to I don't know like 08 so that it's not perfectly sharp so8 and now if I turn back on my subdivision modifier and go back to object mode you will see that now everything is working so let's remove the optimized display so we can see all the geometry here TKS now you get your geometry and it works with the corners it's better than if you had bevels so you don't have like a gazillion polygons in the corners ah you know what let's try it with the bevels I'm just got my bevel two divisions we never need more than two divisions for bevel very rarely unless it's a very very big one but if it's just to catch a highlight on the corners two divisions is enough and remember it's going to be subdivided to oh but wait wait wait it doesn't work why that's because your bevel modifier is under the multires and that's not working you cannot do that what you need to do is to apply the bevel modifier first you need to do this absolutely and then you can do your multi-resolution modifier this is what I get if I zoom out you can see that the density of polygons on the edges is really really really high sculpting will work fine though if your object is going to be distorted Twisted broken whatever you need a uniform mesh because here you see if I twist this I get these illegal polygons in the center it looks like crap it's very simple we need more divisions so let's fix it by adding a ridiculous amount of edge loops and here we go perfectly twisting geometry now it's all good when you have a clean geometry and nice mesh you can select Edge loops and you can insert Edge Loops anywhere you want it's very easy to work with if you have triangles then you are screwed so if I take this and triangulate it now it's impossible to select an edge Loop because it's just a big mess of polygon so even if I click on it if I double click if I uh Control Alt or whatever any options you can imagine it's not going to work so uh yeah it's a messy thing and if I select everything and I want to quadrangula it to put it back into squares well you see it's not working working because it's so Twisted not working well so always have a clean geometry it's much nicer to work with and to modify later another reason why you want a uniform mesh is if you use displacement map so in this case I have this grid here I will connect the displacement and you will see the geometry is actually this place it moves the ver vertices up and down now if I want to see uh a better resolution I will turn on the subdivision modifier and you will see now I get a cool result if I apply the same Shader on the other geometry here well this is what I get you see it's not uniform it looks really bad so the way to fix this is to get a uniform geometry there is however another way to fix this so you can go in your renderer and instead of using the default cycle renderer you're going to go into experimental so I will click here and here I will choose experimental and when you do this in your subdivision modifier you have adaptive subdivision and this will fix the issue it will create micr polygons and you will get the result that you expect the big advantage of this is that you don't need to worry how much geometry you need you could have a single polygon and get the same result so you can get a much lighter geometry and get a nice displacement map however close you get to your geometry but it's going to cost you in render time and it's Cycles only it's not going to work in Eevee sometimes for very complex models you will end up with a triangle in the middle of a flat surface and there's just nothing you can do about it if you have an odd number of triangles you will not be able to resolve the geometry if it's an even number there's always a way to connect them together so what can you do in this case the only thing you could do is to cut this edge here but you will need to continue that cut all the way across your model but for me I would leave it as a triangle probably because it's a good triangle it's triangle that's not going to give you any trouble if you subdivide the geometry so don't go too crazy about this all quad thing it's okay to have a few triangles here and there I'd like to show you a few ways to resolve when you have to connect two meshes that have different density ities so if we have one line here what you can do is just connect from one corner to the other like this you get a triangle well the only way you can get rid of it is to select one of the edge of the triangle and split like this but then again as I explained before you will get a denser mesh in this case I will cut from here to here and then I will select the edge in the center and I will just delete it to get a quad there's another method that you can use in this situation and there it is if you have many edges you need to connect like this well just do like I showed you previously you just go like this bang bang bang and you go around delete the edges in the center to get quads and you can keep going like this forever doesn't matter how many edges you need to connect it's always going to work okay in this case if you don't want to add more polygons on the heavy side already the only thing you can do is to add more polygons on the lightest side if you have this two ways you can do it if you go like this uh the problem you will get is that you get two triangles and then you would have to add more edges on the dense side and you don't want this so do this the only thing you can do actually to fix this is to cut from this corner to this corner oh actually there is a way to get it all quads so cut from here to here and then connect the two triangles together so that's going to be all quads a little bit dense compared to the others but it's working okay 421 this one is pretty simple you just connect from the center here to the edge same thing at the bottom and that's it you're done all right now it's getting more complicated we have a 5 to one uh so we're going to connect just like we did so let's try from here to here and same thing at the bottom here and well actually we have quad everywhere so we're good now the last one is a bit more complicated if you get into this situation well your mesh is not very good to start with so we're going to do this we're going to do this and now the only way to resolve this is actually to have an edge here which is actually a good thing and once you're done you can always select all the vertices and do the smooth vertex trick and don't forget to adjust the repeat so that you get just the right amount of smoothing by the way when you edit a model you want to make sure that your Edge Loops are going to be closed not like this one here when it's a spiral that goes all around the model this used to happen a lot with a zbrush rem mesure now some of you find it very difficult to model in quads only it is very difficult but it's something that you get used to and the more you do it the better you get at it and you find some tricks and you get better and better and better at it now you know the model I showed you at the beginning you know the same model that was in three different versions well I'm going to show you how I did the quad version because yeah I'm the one who did it it was a very long process it took about 4 hours to do and I edited it to try to make it as short as possible it's still very long I hope you're going to follow all the way to the end but you will see all the tricks that I use to do this the first thing you want to do when you get a model like this is to use a decimate modifier and then you change it into plan R right there at the end and Bam now we only have quads and end gon good luck Maya losers uh I mean Maya users and uh you see that sometimes we get some heavy Corners sometimes it's not as dense so we need to adjust this here so let me show you for example here in the corner uh here we got four divisions it's not uniform everywhere you can adjust the angle here so you can get the geometry that you lost by default uh settings so this looks good just going to take a quick look everywhere to see if everything's okay uh all right so that looks okay now we'll apply the modifier Next Step since it's a symmetrical piece I'm going to use a mirror modifier so I can create an edge in the center of the geometry because right now there's none so now I got this nice Edge so that's perfect that's what I want now I can apply it and delete one side of the geometry modeling with all these blue lines for the hard edges is really annoying for me so what I do is I select everything and I will just smooth the entire geometry so make it completely smooth everywhere and then I will have a I will add an edge modifier so Edge the where it is where is it Edge split modifier now I got the same result but at least I get black lines instead of all these blue lines everywhere too thick for these round Parts I get three of them I will select the center polygon grow the selection and then just extract the geometry so it's a separate piece I can work on it later again I'm using my own custom P menus but it's the same function as you do it's just an extract so same thing for the two other ones but whoops my normals all screwed up again what's going on here I do have my Edge modifier that's because I have custom normals on the geometry so I'm just going to go into here and I'm going to clear the custom normals and now it's back to normal okay so I can hide this part I don't need it anymore not for now now I need to fill that hole so I'm going to select the edge all the way around and I'm just going to fill it so here fill then I select the Pol gun that are around this one and this one I fill it again and now it makes a flat surface oh it looks like I'm missing some measures here so let me just rebuild them very fast that's probably because when I did my uh my uh decimate my angle wasn't good enough wasn't at the right setting so I lost some Mees just going to fix it and go around and make sure that everything is okay uh so I'm missing some here and so from here to I will try to connect them actually together from here to uh this one in the center right there same thing at the bottom now the problem that I have is that one has three divisions and the other one has five so I cannot connect them properly what I want is to have four divisions four polygons in the round areas I don't want five I don't want six I don't want three I want four and you will see why later now I get four divisions but they're not equally distributed that's an easy fix so I can select all these edges here actually you just need to select one of the round edges and select The Edge ring and it's going to select them all then you right click you go into Loop tools and you go space and it's going to put them all at the same distance Loop tool is an add-on that comes with blender you just need to turn it on obviously something is not working here because on one side I got three divisions and on the other one I got four so it cannot connect properly so I will need to fix it I'm going to use a loop tool to do this insert an edge in the center then I will select these edges here and again I will select the entire ring here with I I made a hotkey to do it because I use this all the time and then I'm going to do again Loop tool and space now this is fixed now we can connect from here to here one trick I like to do is to select the polygon do a triangulate then quadrangula and most of the time it works but in this case it didn't work here so I'm just going to split this one and delete these two edges but you will see later I will show you some examples where it works very well and now I'm going to keep going to make sure that every corner has four divisions not three not two I want four here we got a little bit of situation here so we need to fix that corner here make it clean so I'm going to start by using my Loop tool and divide this by two then I will go at the opposite edge here I will select it and do a shift W to divide it subdivide it in two parts but when you do this you can actually go there and what I want is not one but two divisions so now I have enough vertices to connect from here to here press J from here to here press J this part is done okay let's keep going I will Fast Forward here because there's not much to see nothing that crazy it's just inserting lines and just cutting stuff uh but you can see that I always keep the original points that were there on the geometry I don't uh create a different geometry I don't redo the bevels I try to keep all the points that are already there to begin with then I went around and I fixed all the end guns I could find there are so many of them but these ones are very easy to fix so I like to use the mesh check add-on to make sure that all the end guns have been fixed actually the small ones the big ones that's going to be another issue but right now I want to make sure that all the small ones have been fixed and this is where it becomes complicated to fix all these big andon so let's try with an easy one this one here I'm going to select the polygon and just do an inset so that I make sure I got clean edges all the way around this something very important for me I want to make sure everything is clean then I will merge all the overlapping vertices so that this way I will end up with only eight instead of 40 the next step is to delete these edges here so I get quads in the corners and it looks that for some reason going add an extra edge here so I will get rid of it this one here and this one delete all right okay now maybe I could connect these vertices here to create quads so I don't have this big End Gun here this is an improvisation thing you just go and you cut and then you adjust and you keep going and I'm going to do stuff and redo it again and fix everything you will see it's a complicated process and I will do the exact same thing for all the big end guns around the geometry this for me is the best way to remove the amount of vercies that you have especially in the corners otherwise you would get way too many it's going to be very hard to deal with don't forget to clean the corners to make them quads all right now that I have reduced the amount of points on my big end guns I will try to split it into smaller chunks I try to keep it square like I mean like for example this one here is not going to be a square it's not going to be a quad but it's going to look like a quad I will fix it later okay that's pretty much what I wanted okay so let's check out this edge here I know by uh experience that the level of division is probably going to be something like this so I will try it I will try this and if it doesn't work I can always adjust later I can still connect a few vertices here so I can try this one here what else can I do uh maybe this one here well I don't want to go too far uh because it's going to be a tricky part so for now I'm just going to leave it like this okay same thing with these faces here I will just offset them uh let's see I got a lot of vertices here maybe I could just collapse them all so we'll just select them and merge them together same thing here I mean these are just too many polygons in this area it's going to be too dense so let's try to keep it lighter if it doesn't work I'll fix it later and of course I will delete these edges here to keep everything as a quad and I will do the same thing all the way around maybe it's not the right way to do it for now it doesn't matter I mean this is all improvisation you try stuff if it doesn't work you can fix it later it's not a problem oh here it's a little bit problematic how am I going to connect this well maybe I could just end insert here a vertex and then I will merge all these points together I can also try to connect points that I know that are aligned that will be connected for sure so like for example this one here I will use a knife tool and just cut like this now you have to make sure that everything has been cut properly like inside the groove here maybe it didn't work all the way yeah that's what I thought so I will have to fix this area here so just cut uh from this one here to this one all right oh I forgot to do the inser here well it's not too late I will do it right now so just inset now the reason I do all these insets it's because of all of the round corners to make the geometry lighter so it's easier to cut and do Edge Loops if I didn't have all these round corners I wouldn't do the inset here all right all these points here I'm just going to merge them together whoops a little bit more merge all right and now we play Connect the Dots again so this one here and well we can make a nice quad here so connect these uh there's a round here but this this Arc of circle is too big I will not merge all these points here cuz it's too big and I'm sure I will need these divisions later obviously this line here will have to go all the way there probably all the way to the bottom also but for now I'm just going to keep it like this and I'm going to fix here the uh the problem that occurred here like we had before so connect from here to here and it's done you know what let's finish it all the way down it doesn't have to be perfectly vertical you're going to see we're going to do so many modifications on this so it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned for now we don't care and one more cut to finish the entire Loop so now I'm going to keep going like this for every big panels I can find that I can offset I will do it and merge all the vertices like described before and here's another one I can bring all the way down this one is pretty big it goes all the way around the geometry so I will do my inser here and now I will do the cleanup I know I said everything's going to be adjusted later but I still like to keep everything clean when I model so I will just align them I know they're going to move later but you know it's just it's just nicer to work with and of course we don't want to forget to delete the edges in the corners to make sure that we have quads everywhere okay I just cut six minutes of a clean up because it would have been so long and boring now that everything is done I will start connecting points like I did before so these obviously needs to be connected I will do the obvious first so like this for sure needs to be connected there and this one on the other side I will speed this up so you can see all the cuts that I do okay here I can see that I have a very large polygon and then the three small ones next to it so I'll try to even the distribution by inserting two Loops here so so what's going on here on top uh it's it's a little bit messy I'll fix it later the important part is that here I got an even distribution of polygons and now I can continue connecting all the dots Oh but before I continue I can see that these are not properly spaced so I'm just going to use a space from Loop tool to make them at equal distance I have a marking menu but it's the same thing as if you right click you going Loop tool and space all right here I'm going to insert four Loops this way I know they are all at equal distance I don't have to do manually and for this big End Gun here I'm not going to do it manually I'm going to triangulate and quadrangula much faster I do this all the time so I have hot keys for triangulate and quadrangula obviously this one will be connected to this one at the bottom here uh for the other ones before I continue I think I should have set in this uh this area here that's this this part here yeah so let me do this okay now Edge Loops two here and then I connect with the points on top so select this one and this one press J to connect them this one and this one it's much faster sometimes to use j instead of the knife tool okay we have one more where are we going to connect it h so uh let's divide this one here you can press shift W to divide them and it's going to connect the points already for you so that's another cool way to do it so that works here uh there's one one polygon that's problematic I'll fix it later I don't want to do it now and we need to finish this where am I going to connect all that stuff you need to look at uh the big picture where everything's going to be connected and here I can see there's an issue here that I didn't fix before so maybe I should fix this first and then I got totally distracted and I forgot to finish the line I was supposed to line so I just kept cutting and cutting and cutting and merging and cutting and cutting and merging and cutting a little bit of fast forward here because it's already taking a long time and we're at 30 minute and 50 seconds already and I Tred to make this tolerable for you guys oh this is important here we know that the geometry is going to be uh mirrored so we don't want this line here we want to get rid of it so I'm just going to cut here to make it straight and I'm going to delete the extra edges when I did the offset on this part it kind of screwed up the corners here so I will have to fix it by just aligning these vertices with the ones on the other side so that I get a continuity okay at this point I think I did all the offsets on the geometry now what I need to do is to cut everywhere to try to get quads uh everywhere just quads so I just cut and cut and cut until I get just quads here I select a bunch of edges I will just press the shift W to insert a dot in between it connects everything at the same time which is great now you will see that the more you make quads the denser the mesh will be well that's the way it is there's no way around it and if I didn't merge the vertices in the corner when I did the offset it would be insane it would be way too dense oh and there's the edge I totally forgot to do before so let's try to cut all the stuff here boom connect this and this all right this is done uh all right we need to fix that too okay so obviously I need to cut horizontally here so I will do it let's fix the top part here so here insert edges I need 1 2 3 4 I need four then I can connect all these vertices and that should do it I will connect these two vertices so that after this I can do a nice Edge Loops to connect all these vertices so now I can go edge Loops 1 2 3 4 okay Edge Loops triangulate quad angulate here we go uh same thing here so let's do an uh an edge Loop here here with two divisions and then we connect these triangulate quadr angulate it's done now that most of the parts are quads it's easier to insert Edge Loops so here I can insert an edge before I was using the cut tool I don't need to do this anymore I can just insert an edge but I still have to do this manually here pressing J to connect the dots clean up continues here so these lines here shift W connect these two whoops here I will also insert two Edge loops and I will connect them with the edges under here these but the problem is the polygons don't have the same width so they all different so there's an easy way to fix this you select all these here and then you select the ring so there's a function I showed you before select select the the ring so now it gets everything here but it also gets a lot of stuff that we don't want to be adjusted some are good but some are not and some are just floating in the middle of nowhere so a little clean up before I do it cu I want to make sure that I only do it where I need it uh like here we don't want for sure to mess with this area so once everything is cleaned up you use the space function from Loop tool this part is a little bit messy I'm just going to do a quick fix I don't really need to do this now but I'm doing it just so that you know it's aligned I I don't like when it looks too messy but I know I'm going to have to come back and revisit this part anyway okay let's take a break and take a look at the mesh tool on to check where are the end guns to see if I missed anything looks like there's a problem here there's a little vertex here I'll just snap it here it's gone and yeah there are still a few end guns at places that shouldn't be any end guns here uh you see there's a little I'm going to cheat here I'm going to cheat a little bit because it's easier to just snap it here nobody will be able to tell and just realign this one with this one uh I don't want to add extra polygons just for something so small so yeah I'm cheating here this one here so uh end guns so I'm going to fix as many end guns as I can the easy ones I remember that part here I told you the circle the the arc on top I didn't want to merge all the points because I would need them later well I do and now I can connect them and I'm very lucky because I got the exact right number of edges to connect them so I'm very very lucky here's another part where I was very lucky so I inserted this edge here and Edge Loop here and then when I go check on the other side where this goes it can whoops oh turns out it's perfectly aligned with this one so of course I'm going to connect them but I don't want to forget that on the other side I still need to finish here this connection so this one and this one connect here I get into a situation where I don't want to extend this Edge all the way to the end because it's going to get too heavy so I'm going to do the little trick I've shown you before I'm just cutting like this like this and the other one on top and that's it all quads another situation here where I use space to distribute everything evenly maybe I can try this one too let's see what it does space yeah now I'm at a point where I tried to get the mesh uniform everywhere so get squares that would be equally spaced so I can just add some edges here oh I need to finish at the bottom why it didn't go all the way through H there must be a bad polygon somewhere ah it wasn't connected here that's why it didn't work so I will just fix it and then add the edges that are missing so Loop tool and triangulate quad angulate now let's do the same thing here okay this one goes all the way through that's good so four edges should be okay now I need to fix that triangle on top and this is how I'm going to do it and let's go on this side here and insert more edges so Loop Tool uh 1 2 3 4 yeah okay and now I just need to connect the dots okay one more Loop here it doesn't go all the way through why uh ah there's an EXT vertex here so let's get rid of it okay let's try again Loop yeah now it's working let's see how it goes at the bottom uh it goes there maybe I don't want it all the way there maybe I want to put it you know just align it with this one and then connect these two dots together no actually it's a bad idea I prefer to add an an extra Loop here yeah that's much better so this one now I can align it with this one here poof and connect them together yeah that's pretty good and this one I can connect here whoops there's a mess here let me fix that let's work on the sides so here Edge Loops we want to get squares so these look pretty good all right if I want to be able to do my Edge Loops all the way across I need to connect from one side to another so let's take for example I don't know this vertex here see on this side there's one here let's connect them together yeah okay that should work same thing at the bottom so I can connect this point here with this one here so now I should be able to insert Edge Loops all the way through and here we go let's get some squares maybe one more yeah that looks good all right cool more Loops make sure you match the other side and then select the polygon in between that is not connected triangulate and quadrangula all right let's see if we can fix this first of all I will get rid of this big edge here I don't need it that goes all the way through like this we're going to connect all this stuff horizontally so this one with this one blah blah blah blah blah seriously guys I'm really lucky that it aligns perfectly like this okay here what do we do we need an extra edge here so let's do this Loop and uh yeah it goes all the way through though maybe I don't want want that so uh I'm just going to delete the extra Edge added here so just delete this one here and then select the entire Loop and delete it okay and uh what am I going to do with this just connect it I get a triangle we'll fix it later and uh yeah so now let's let's connect vertically so like this and try to get quads again but before I do that I need to fix all these bad polygons first uh what is going on here looks like I deleted an edge by mistake yeah yes all collapsed here easy fix let's just connect these two vertices Bo okay now I can continue here I added a bunch of Loops but I'm not so lucky when I go on the other side and check now it's not perfectly aligned so I will have to do something to fix it oh well turns out it's not too bad I just need to line this one here let's connect these then insert a loop in the middle here and another one at the bottom and then connect the points so yeah it wasn't too bad but that extra Edge is going in the middle of nowhere so I need to fix it and I saw that I have some end guns here so these are easy to fix I'm just going to connect them from one side to another by pressing J and then one Edge Loop and I connect with the other side and this part has been fixed so this one here and connect this one with this one and then this one with this one and we're good okay so we keep going on our way down insert Edge Loops uh let's see if I messed up the other side no this part's not done yet so I'm okay now I can finish this part okay let's add some lines here uh now it becomes a little bit tricky at the corner and also if I look at the lower left corner that's not good either because I have a very very long Edge there okay how am I going to fix that well I'm going to fix the bottom part first but I know that if I insert Edge Loops it's going to go all the way around and I don't want this what I'm going to do is just cut here H it's not the best way to do it I realize this while I'm doing this clip here but this is just make sure that I'm going to break the continuity so now I can insert the edge and it's going to stop right there and then I can delete this Edge that I created that I don't need it anymore but what I should have done actually instead of going through all this trouble is to just select the edges that I wanted to split and just press shift W to cut them anyways it's not that important now I can insert edges here and fix that area oh I got two triangles here that's an easy fix when you have an even number of triangles you can always get rid of them so we'll split like this and then just delete this Edge and here we go all quads let me select all these edges here and press shift W to split and connect them oh and while I'm there looks like I forgot to do the inset on this part so let me fix this very fast and of course these three edges that I need to fix so just going to cut here cut here select the three edges and delete them insert Edge Loops uh it's not going all the way through I will fix it later now I want to go back to the bottom part so here okay more Edge Loops okay 1 2 3 four yeah they look like Square to me that looks good now on this side I will need four divisions so 1 2 3 four okay can I connect this in the back I'm sure I can okay I will fix this manually I will deal with the Eng gun at the corner later let's keep going connect connect connect connect oh oh I got an extra one I will just get rid of it and then I will space everything back okay we continue the cleanup uh oh I'm very lucky cuz I got three Edge Loops here only three that I need to connect and it's going to work on both sides up and down so I'm very lucky triangulate quad angulate this one too triangulate quad angulate I'm really lucky and this one here nah all right all right I'll fix it yeah yeah yeah I got a triangle I see it but maybe I'll fix it later okay little clean up here so obviously this one is going to be connected with this one and this one with the this one at the bottom now uh here I need to insert an edge in the middle so let's do that uh let's go edge Loop it doesn't go through that means there's something wrong somewhere so uh let's start with adding this one here connect the dots and try to see what is going on why it didn't go through okay I will add the other loop here and let's see what it does on top here yeah it creates a mess I don't want this um no I don't want to keep this so what I'm going to do is just delete one edge here and then select all these ones and delete them and I got a little triangle here but it's okay maybe we'll fix it later so I'll just connect these two dots okay let's go back down so let's see what happened here okay so it's just these two points I need to connect what happened why it didn't work um and there it is there are two points here that needed to be connected and they were not so now it's fixed okay let's continue where we were so connect all these dots these are obvious now we end up with two end guns here so what can we do well there's an easy way to fix it it's not elegant I mean I would prefer another solution we'll come back to this later but now I just want to fix it temporarily so I'm just going to go like this here tuck duck duck in the middle of the edges and then connect the corners one two and three and that's it now we have fixed this uh area it's all quads it was time to do some cleanup so I selected a lot of edge loops and I used space from Loop tool to make them evenly spaced I will skip this I will go very fast because it took a very very long time still it's not always perfect so in this case I go to plan B which is selecting all the polygons I want to fix and I want to make sure I keep a row all the way around I don't want to go all the way to the edges so I select these polygons here I need to remove one more row here then I go into vertex and I go smooth and I adjust as needed so I get a clean mesh I've turned on the mesh check add-on again so I can see if I have any end guns in the in the way that I need to get rid of and some triangles too so it looks like these two triangles this this would be very easy to fix actually it was in the demo I just showed before so I select these points here and I connect them together and I go here in diagonal connect them together and delete a few edges and it's all quads here I got a situation where I got a bunch of triangles and yes I can get rid of all of them but it would make the mesh much denser and I don't want that I prefer to keep the triangles yeah I do so this is how I would fix it I would connect this one with this one this edge here with here and this one is easy just cut like this but then my mesh will be completely ununiform and what about the last one uh yeah the last one I could connect this edge here and like this and like this and like this well there are many other ways that we could do to connect them together but you know I prefer to keep the triangles at least for now here we have a triangle and an end gun that's going to be easy to fix I'll just go into my knife tool and I'm going to connect the middle of this edge here and like this and here we go all quads I will select all these vertices and go into vertex and smooth again if you reach this situation where you have a triangle that you know you cannot get rid of try to put it in a place that is not going to bother you too much so in this case it's like deep inside this groove should be okay okay it's getting better and better mesh looks pretty good it's still not perfect but I'm still working on it also uh let's add the round Parts you know at the beginning we had some round parts that I put invisible so let's bring them back and attach them to the main geometry and that's going to be pretty easy okay first I'm going to clean up this geometry cuz it's a mess so this part here triangulate quadrangula same thing with this one triangulate quadr angulate then I remove the extra Edge same thing for the same thing for this one here triangulate quadrangula little one here quadrangula triangulate extra edges delete select the central face poke it so you're going to face here and poke poke poke poke where poke and now that the geometry is clean I can remove one out of two edges here Edge Loops uh why because it's too heavy it has 24 divisions so we don't need that many 12 is going to be just enough I just select all of these and I delete them poof and then I can go in the center and I will delete one out of two edges so that we have quads so 1 2 3 4 five six and then delete here we go all quads the normals all messed up that's easy to fix let's try with an edge split modifier and no it's still messy so I'm just going to go here and clear the custom Uh custom normals yeah okay now it's good okay so I'm going to select the nine polygons that surround the circle and I'm going to inser them just so that I will get a a little bit more resolution so this one here and I'm going to do it a second time now in Loop tool if you right click Loop tool you have Circle and going to circle this part and you can rotate it to align it with your geometry actually what I want to do is to align the circle with the mesh and not the circle in the back uh cuz this is cleaner this way it's more properly oriented okay little adjustment here to align it okay that's good let me move these vertices out of the way so all I'm going to do is to select them then I'm going to go into vertex and I'm going to smooth them I don't need these polygons anymore bye-bye okay I will rotate this part here so that it's aligned with the mesh that looks pretty good I'll round it to 15° because that's probably what it's supposed to be anyway to begin with now I just need to snap the points on the other one now I did something a little bit stupid here I should have merged the two geometries together so that when I move the Vertes together they would already snap together and merge but I didn't do it so it's it's an extra step but I didn't do it for the two other ones cuz I I learned I I adapted as I was doing it so yeah all these points are now connected now I need to select both geometries and I need to merge them together then I need to select all the veres and I need to merge them again so it's two steps that I could have avoided if I just joined the two geometry together before I start moving all the vertices you know what I mean anyway I hope you do so I just merge all these points you can see they have been connected and now it's just one happy geometry it's still a little bit messy so let's see if I select these edges here and I smooth them let's see what it's going to do so reex smooth and not too good so you know what I'm just going to select the ring here and I'm going to use the space from Loop tool to make them at equal distance oh it looks like I screwed up here when I uh connected the circles uh so I'm just going to delete the fencing polygons here these one yeah and another one here okay so now I got a hole how can I fix this well it's easy you just select the entire ring here and you just go fill hole boom hey you know let's try a mirror modifier just to see the entire part just to see what it looks like so modifier apply a mirror modifier and I get this that's because a transformation have not been applied you see here bad bad geometry so just apply the transformation everything is set to zero now if I turn my modifier on it's good it's working uh you know what I'm going to do I'm going to apply the mirror modifier because I need to fix some seams in the center so I'm going to apply this and if I look around all the way around some parts look good but this part here obviously can be optimized and now I'm using techniques that I've been showing you at the beginning of this clip and here you know the drill you select the faces and you go vertx smooth and you adjust as needed here we go yeah I'm not too happy with it I think I can do better so so let me just select all these polygons here and what I'm going to do is to fill them so that it will remove all the edges in the center and I will start from scratch first I will do the obvious stuff okay so let's try something all right so select the polygons and smooth well I'm not too happy with it because I got this one polygon here in the middle and it's not cut in two and if I use a mirror modifier it's always going to cut it again in the center okay let's go to plan C I will cut them in another way a little bit of smoothing and it looks like I forgot to delete some edges so that's not good let me remove them and try again oh I still have two triangles here and this is easier to fix once you do the mirror modifier because now you can connect from one side to the other which is something I couldn't do before so now let me try to smooth all this stuff again and this is a much better solution than what I had before in this case all the polygons are about the same size and they are well spreaded never be afraid to revisit what you've done before actually we're going to use this technique everywhere like I select all these polygons here where I shrink the geometry and I smooth them and oh look it's much nicer to do all these ones here I just select one and I go select similar co- planar so this way I select all of them poof and then I shrink the selection and I get just the interior when I do this and now I can do my vertex and smooth vertex smooth and here I got a much cleaner geometry this part here is also messy so you know what I'm going to do the exact same thing I just did before I'm going to select all these polygons here I'm going to fill them and then I'm going to rebuild the geometry and here again I'm super lucky that it matches perfectly I got the exact amount of points that I need to connect from one side to the other okay let's do the vertical ones well two ways you could do this you could use Loop tools which is easier but in this case I don't know why I use use this I use shift W to subdivide them here triangulate quadr angulate you know the drill H it didn't work so uh let's do it manually I will remove all these edges boom okay so now we got uh all this is fixed we have this on top how we going to fix this if I do this I get a quad here and here well what am I going to do well actually maybe I can cut the top Edge cuz looks like I have a long Edge on top so maybe that's what I'm going to do but first I will smooth all these vertices okay so let's fix this triangle on top I only have one triangle so there's no way I'm going to be able to get rid of it this I'm just going to be able to move this triangle somewhere else so if I cut here connect like this okay then I can cut from here to here and that's where my triangle is going to be now but there's no way I can get rid of it that's for sure this part is still not looking good to me so let's see what can I do uh if I Smo the vertices what do I get uh I can do better okay I'm improvising here I'm trying some stuff so what if I cut here and here and uh delete these edges here oh okay I know all right so I'm just going to use the cut tool and do like I did like I showed you before a little smoothing and everything is well pretty good okay so let's do the same thing with this mess here select all these polygons and I'm just going to fill them empty and try to connect again and smoothing and yeah much better and there was this part here that I did the beginning you know what I changed my mind I'm just going to connect it straight from one side to another uh it's going to be better for the formation it creates kind of a elongated polygons but you know they cannot all be perfect quads I mean uh squares all the time so I've changed my mind I'm just reconnecting them so there you go the model has been cleaned up almost all quads a few triangles no end guns it's watertight it's very clean you can it can be sculpted can be deformed you can do whatever you want with this model it's going to work so there you have it the answer is it depends on what you do you're in Gaming use triangles as much as you want doesn't matter the game engine will convert everything into triangles anyway it doesn't matter you work in VFX for sure they will zbrush it they zbrush everything in VFX because that's how they add all the imperfections on the model to make it more realistic and also when you do Houdini simulations you want a clean model also you don't want to get a crappy model all right so there's your answer all right bye

Channel: Blender Bob

Views: 7,397

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Id: ij87sEW-yoc

Length: 56min 30sec (3390 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2024