Topology Tip: Perfect Sub-D Modeling Every Time!

in one of my recent topology tips videos I brought up how to add details after you subdivide and I got a ton of questions on how to do that in this video I'm going to break it down step by step so let's jump right into it so I want to start with why are we even doing this so if I zoom into this model here you can see that I'm working on this cylinder for my AGL long cult for this fascia Stampede revolver and I was exploring different methods of modeling it looks okay at first glance but if I zoom in and look at the cutout here for for the cylinder you'll start to notice and it may or may not come through on the YouTube video but you'll start to notice artifacts and pinching around these corners and if I turn on the wireframe here you'll see exactly what I'm talking about now let me switch to just kind of a clay version here so here's the wireframe right so we can see all in all it's not that bad the wireframe and everything looks pretty clean and we are just using this Edge flow method to add in geometry in areas that we need it which are these Corners here now here it gets so tight that I had really no choice but to add in some triangles here now in this specific case we get left with the pinching that I'm talking about so now let's go to the final result here where you can see exactly what I'm talking about we have this subdivided version and I've added this detail now the reason why this works here is because what this allows me to do is protect the surface geometry so if I enable material View and turn off wireframe on shaded you can see how much cleaner that looks around these Corners here so that should give you a good idea of the problem areas and a solution on how to get this to work now disclaimer right this is for subd modeling only so this is not meant to be used as a low poly asset what this can be used for is baking down to the low poly asset so keep that in mind that this is explicitly for subd modeling and minimizing surface artifacts so again we're here we add in our details and we're left with artifacts so let's talk about the solution and what I did to get that quick Interruption if you've clicked on this video you're probably interested in 3D modeling and topology so I'm excited to announce that I'm putting together a 3D modeling topology Master Class whether you're a beginner or an advanced user this is going to help improve your skills in 3D modeling this is just the first course and trust me you're in good hands I'm an industry professional and I've been teaching for over 15 years and I have some of the most popular topology videos on my YouTube and this is going to be one of the first of many courses on my platform I will be covering the entire 3D art pipeline starting with modeling all the way through rendering for both offline and real-time rendering so stay tuned and be sure to check out my patreon for Early Access information so I'll see you there so the way you want to think about this is your primary secondary and tertiary details here for this cylinder you can see that I've added in all of the primary details so I have the main cutouts here as well as the round holes where the rounds would go all of that detail is great and actually if I isolate you can see that there's a little bit more detail here on the front with some of these extrusions so all of that is looking good and this is exactly what I want now from this step what we do is actually collapse the subdivision yes this is a destructive workflow so you can see that this is the base model and then I subdivide and collapse that subdivision so you need to make sure between this step that your base model is good to go I always recommend duplicating and saving a backup and because of that it pretty much has saved my butt anytime I need to go back to that base mesh and refine it so now that we have this subdivided version you can see that here in this step so this next step is I've just separated the exact areas that I'm adding in this secondary detail so you can see I've just taken these faces here so just literally selecting these faces and then hit Control Plus on the numpad to grow your selection and I just duplicate it and move that up here and then I start the modeling phase because of this added an extra geometry from the subdivision this gives me all the extra geometry that I need to add in this detail so what's great here now is these Corners if I want to sharpen these Corners a it I can go in and just start to protect these corners and just start Edge slid sliding them right where I need them right and so you can see now that gives me a sharper corner and if I actually do that in smooth preview mode you kind of see exactly what I'm talking about right so you can see how this is giving me extra geometry and this is great because it's not disturbing or it's not disrupting the surface geometry around it which is exactly the goal for what we're trying to achieve here so I'll undo that and I'll talk a little bit about the modeling process now I'm not going to go through and create this step by step I think you get the idea of the modeling process but what I can do now or at least show you is high level is you know I would now take these new surfaces or I would take these new faces and just begin modeling right so I can hit I for inset and create these new faces then I can just press e and extrude in there we go and if I want to I can also create this curvature here right so if I want you can see how in here it's kind of this half cylinder Half Moon type shape so you can do that a couple of different ways if I wanted to take these faces here and work with the the pivot I can just change these to normal and just kind of move these and that gives me enough geometry to create whatever details and then of course you know I can go in and start to like Edge slide these to have a little bit more control on this form so Edge slide that great and then from here I can go through and just start cutting in that geometry so if I press k for the knife tool I can just start to cut in and create that half moon shape like so I think I actually went up one more here and that's fine and then you know I'm just Edge sliding here and then again just kind of edge splitting these edges here and there's some more I need to clean up but I'm just showing you the example of how to kind of take this now what I can do is just add in another Edge Loop here because this adding this Edge loop after we've subdivided is completely fine because it's not disrupting the surface of the geometry here and I can start to move these geometries in you see how now I can kind of push that in and then if I wanted to add in that little bit of a curvature now of course you may see I'm left with a triangle here no problem at all we can just split this geometry like so and so now we get this face Loop and we can still maintain quads and there you go that's it at a high level and then now if I hit control one or two you can see I can start to add in that detail and I can start adding my holding lines and do whatever it is that I need to do so I can go in here now and if you wanted to again kind of like add in that holding line and then if you wanted to you know bevel this Edge now I can bevel that add in an extra Edge and that's great and there you go so again quick and dirty at a high level I just wanted to show exactly kind of how to now add in that geometry to get something like this and then of course now this is our new base mesh so you can see that I already have another subdivision and it's starting to get pretty high poly but remember the goal here the goal here is to make sure that we minimize surface artifact and pinching for subd modeling and I can always bake this down I've been actually exploring a remesh workflow where I'm working into the tens of millions of triangles to get really focusing on the surface and then baking that down and as long as the low poly is what's optimized and the edge flow is completely fine so that is the gist of it that is exactly the workflow that I use and I want to emphasize I don't use this for every single asset I use these specifically for assets that are giving me problem areas and areas or geometry that are especially curvy so again you have the red and you can see the topology and Edge flow here looks okay but we have some pinching and then I go through this process of creating the base form subdividing having a new base model with all of my extra details that I subdivide again so this subdivision typically is just a one division subdivision so I don't go crazy and then subdivide but but yeah that's the whole workflow I hope you found this helpful I do plan to put this file up on my patreon so if you'd like to support this channel for only a few bucks and to get access to the majority of my source files be sure to join the patreon and you get a bunch of other perks too so with that let let me know if you have any other questions in the comments below and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 14,203

Keywords: 3d, modeling, topology, how to, blender, maya, 3ds max, cinema 4d, tutorial, ngons, ngon, tri, triangles, vfx, games, video games, deformation, pinching, surface, artifacts, perfect, tip, workflow, 3d modeling, 3d modeling blender

Id: pxerDwUVmI0

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024