Understanding Topology and Edge Flow in 3D Modeling

hey everyone today we're going to cover five tips for better understanding topology in any 3d software i'll be using maya for this demo but the concepts and workflows discussed here can be applied to any 3d software i've narrowed down these tips after many years of professionally modeling and teaching students over the years to improve their understanding of topology if you found these tips helpful have any of your own tips that could help people or want me to cover topology in greater detail let me know down in the comments below as always a like and subscribe is always appreciated as i continue to grow the content of this channel so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya and i'm going to start with the very first tip and the first tip is localizing topology and what i mean by localizing topology is having the ability to add topology within your model without spreading topology and edge flow in areas that you don't want for example if i go ahead and take a look at this hammer boy that i modeled in a previous tutorial and i want to add geometry here for the hands the last thing that i'd want to do is to jump jump over to multi-cut and just to just add in edge loops here that are now going to run the length of the model right and you can see how this gives me unintended edges that run all the way around the model i definitely don't want that so what i want to do is let me undo that jump back to this plane here and i can show you kind of a simpler a simpler point of view you can see that i have one face here that's being cut and split into two faces and then it's then being split into even more faces here so now we have one two three four so we started with one and now we have four you can see that i can combine that with different techniques here where i start with one face end up with two and then split that to have four here and then now i can even get almost six faces here right and so this is just allowing me to add topology right and localizing it in areas that i only need it now how would i do this if i go ahead and create a cube here we can go ahead and take a look i'll go ahead and scale this cube up and zoom in and we'll go ahead and just do a control e for extrude and then do an offset bring this in and then hit g to repeat last and then extrude that out now again if i wanted to now extrude some fingers on here and i go ahead and do the multi-cut we can see what happens if i just start adding in a bunch of edges that are now routing throughout the rest of the model so instead what i can do is i'll control middle click add that in the middle and control middle click again now one thing that you can do there's a couple ways of doing this you can add uh control middle click a few times here like so or i'll just go ahead and left click a couple of times now what we can do here is i can go ahead now and move these faces and i can do that by entering the multi-cut tool so if i grab the multi-cut tool i can start at one corner and cut in about in the middle and then start at the other corner and cut at the middle here like so then i have this now of course i'd want to just kind of meet these or connect these two then i want to remove these edges here like so now we have these or this face loop running around and that allows me to be able to go through and delete these edges now i want to make sure to do the same thing on the bottom but for right now i'm simply just going to delete these faces so it doesn't loop all the way around for the simplicity of this demonstration so i'll go ahead and select these edges and then remove and then now you can see that i have these faces here here without adding all that extra geometry in on the rest of the mesh and you can combine that with techniques again if i go ahead and just kind of shift move this to extrude and if you wanted to even add even more you could grab your multi cut tool again and i can middle mouse cut that and then you can do something like this where we call these i call these kind of kites or diamonds like so and now i can go ahead and start to add in more geometry or edges here right so like so now what this is going to do is allow me to have a bunch of edges or a bunch of faces here without again taking it throughout the rest of the mesh and then now even though you can see that i have these triangles here i can simply remove this middle triangle here and create the kite kite shape that i was talking about and then now i go ahead and just kind of move that and then there we go and again you'll see this being used all over the place i use these all the time for hands so you can see that i have this kite shape here that's just allowing me to add in some extra geometry for the fingers without having to go through and add it throughout the rest of the glove or the rest of the model you'll see me use that here as well on the back of the model where i start to use this inner part this face loop to be able to add in some more geometry and again kind of the last thing here is if i go here now you know you can go ahead and move this edge like so and you can kind of just manually uh do it where your i multi-cut this and go ahead and multi-cut and kind of add in a point here that real quick and you can just manually cut in to get these loops too so that's another way of kind of doing the same thing so i do this all the time like so and then i can terminate it at this edge and again you get this nice face loop running all the way around so being able to understand this how to kind of start with one and split your edges and get more or split your faces and get more edges to add that topology this is what i mean by localizing topology so using this technique is something that i use all the time using these kite quads is something that i use all over my models the next tip is how to clean up ngons and triangles a lot of times you'll be splitting and cutting faces and cutting some edges and you'll get to a point where you're kind of running along and you have to diagonally cut across and then you're left with a triangle and an end con so i get an n-gon which is a five-sided face now we want to make sure at least for organic modeling and most of heart surface modeling we want to typically end up with what's called just quads or four-sided polygons you see that i have this which is pretty complex but all of these complex uh cuts and edges here are quads and they're four-sided all right so when we get to this instance when we're cutting across edges and faces we can simply use this technique where we split this in half and what i mean by that is if i go ahead and jump into the multi-cut tool i can just click on the middle part of the edge here and take it and terminate at the corner of that face which gives me now this i know this might seem very simple but i'm telling you when you're going through and modeling and cutting and splitting now you've just created this nice clean face loop that's running all over the model which is exactly what you want and it avoids a triangle and un ngon which both of those combine is going to give a lot of smoothing artifacts so by smoothing i mean by holding shift right click and going to mesh smooth or smooth and so you can see you get these nice even quads without that before if i go ahead and actually just delete this and go to the object mode and go ahead and smooth you'll see it's going to try to do its best here but it's giving us a little bit more uneven of a subdivision now so it's always going to subdivide its best to try to end up with quads but if the subdivision algorithm has to account for a lot of triangles and n-gons that's what's going to give you artifacts all right so for example if i go ahead and pull open or pull up here this sphere and i bring this over and i'm going to scale it up and i can go ahead and you know give myself a little bit more subdivisions maybe something like 32 and this is you know where you can apply this technique if i go ahead and start multi-cutting now instead of just grabbing edges like this that are already on existing edges and working with that well if i wanted to do something more organic i certainly can so i'll go ahead and grab my multi-cut tool and just start cutting and then now i can start cutting across edges like so and you get something like this now again you're going to be left with these triangles and end guns like so so in order to easily fix that we can go ahead and just split this in half and split this top one in half like so and there you go we can kind of control shift slide on the edge and then what we can get is selecting this edge now obviously i'm not going to worry about where this ends up but this is fine and then i can hold shift right click and do a bevel edge so you get something like this now of course we see how this ends up you can easily fix that by going into multi-cut and using that technique that i showed on tip one so now if i go ahead and just kind of cut this across like so and then i cut to cut it and meet it at these corners here there you go you get these nice quads here which is exactly what we want and then you can terminate it here like so and this is just one way to do it right so here's just another way of cutting it which is just a few more clicks but it's all the same at the end of the day okay and then we get this nice face loop here that's running all the way across our model so i can click click here and grab these and then i can do a control e for extrude and move these in and g again just give myself a little bit of a holding line and i'm just showing an example of how to just kind of cut in on an organic surface and there you go so now you can see that cut in pretty well and i'm able to add in these nice corners and clean those up and still maintain quads by splitting that quad excuse me that triangle and that end gun all right the next tip i'm going to recommend is edge flow and keeping an even distribution of edges if we take a look at the model here as an example you can see that this character model that i've created has a nice clean even distribution of edges and that everything every edge that's in here is helping the form okay and what do i mean by that if i actually go and select this mesh and apply or hold right click just simple right click don't hold shift or anything and assign a new material i'm going to assign what's called a surface shader i like to use my surface shaders because it just lets me know where my my edges are being most impactful and if i have any dead edges and it just allows you to look at the silhouette of the model and focus on the form if you notice you have what's called dead edges so for example if i take this and delete these you can see now i just have straight edges here and then if i multi-cut and maybe add in a couple of cuts now look at the difference right look at the difference between this which is super flat which is again kind of those dead edges that i was talking about right so if we go ahead and maybe duplicate this and move it this up like so and i'll remove these as and you have to be careful right because sometimes you're just going in and cutting and adding things but not adding to the form that's where you run into issues like this all right and then i can do assign a new material and assigned the surface shader right and you can see that here i'm getting more def more form out of my edges here versus here which is a complete straight line it's very subtle but these are the things that i'm looking for as i'm going through and working on my models right and so you can see if i do the same thing here our arms now are super straight right and very tubular all right so you definitely want to keep that in mind and even distribution of edges and adding edges as you go right so i can take a look now and kind of see you know this here with this with this tip right so now i have the next tip which is going to be holding edges and face loops so edge flow here you can see is really important and especially when it comes to holding the form you can see i have this fairly organic looking axe shape and i have just like the last tip a good you know even distribution so that's being applied here as well and then i'm having these holding lines that's being applied to my my models a lot of times i'll see people you know students and whatnot create models and they won't add in these edges to hold form so you always want to make sure to add in those good holding lines on your models in the simplest form i can go ahead and create a cylinder here and bring this over and if we take a look at this and i can give this you know maybe 32 maybe even 16 right so you can see it kind of working more impactfully so if i have something like this and just right off the bat if i go ahead and hit 3 for smooth preview i've lost that form right so that's where your edge flow and holding lines are going to come into play so if i go now into here you know and grab my multi-cut tool i can add a multi-cut here at the top and then here at the bottom but then watch what happens it's starting to get better right but i still need a little bit more so if i'll apply a fong here you can see how kind of soft that's looking right so imagine if this was an arm or a piece on a hard surface model we need more geometry i always tell students don't rely on smooth preview for your form so meaning you need to add in geometry and the the mesh smooth that happens at the end this really should just be kind of like if you were applying this uh this soften edge at the end that's how you want to look at it you don't want to rely on it for your form so you can see we still need a little bit more here for the the subdivision so what i'll do now is go into face mode select these faces here at the top and the bottom and then i'll extrude these faces and then i'll do an offset so now i got these so this is getting better so i'm holding the form from the top and the bottom but then i also need now look what happened to these edges they're coming closer together so i'm going to need even more edges here in the middle for this to better subdivide so for now if i go ahead and just control middle click about two to three times so i'll do it three times now look at this you can see how much better this looks and if i go ahead and duplicate and move this this is the sub d model or the subdivided one the smooth preview this one now is going to be the soften edge right so you can see that now they're much similar here in overall form versus having something where we originally started which was you know not having these holding lines and the holding edges now this is again in its simplest form how i would apply this to a cylinder right so the same can be applied to more complex models here so definitely looking for these face loops here for holding the form we have our holding lines here and then you'll see the kites and everything are coming in now i did want to add in i left this triangle here so you can get an understanding of sometimes having triangles are completely okay especially with hard surface and flat objects so don't worry and don't try to kill yourself to try to get all even quads sometimes a simple triangle will will keep things just cleaner uh even without having to cut in and add more geometry all right and so you can see another example here where if i turn on edge faces here you can see that i'm using these kite quads all over the model here this is kind of on a boot on a character that i modeled out too long ago and then we can see that we have these face loops here these holding lines you know that's just holding the overall form right because without that that's not going to hold the form as well right these are the subtle differences between you know having and not having these things so you can see up the difference in the spread here um when it comes to subd modeling and topology and if i re-add that you can see now it really keeps this edge tighter here all right and i was actually in the middle of this one so this one needs a little bit more holding lines but i left it like this so you can kind of see exactly what i'm talking about here all right and then you can see more examples of how i use kite quads especially when you're you're working with larger faces that have to come down to really really thin faces here so this is a recaro c a racing seat that i modeled for a vehicle and you can see exactly that technique and that edge flow being put into practice here all right so these are uh the four and the last one the fifth technique um is is going to help you improve topology uh almost immediately and it's going to be practice you know practice topology but what i mean by that is you know focus on just re-topologizing all right so what i mean is take a look at uh i just pulled this model this head sculpt from zbrush and i just decimated it down and i brought it into maya find some models that you've done in the past okay and if if you're struggling learning topology and edge flow work and use the tool called quadra so what i'm going to do now is select this model go ahead and turn it into a live surface and then i'm going to use quattro now what quadra is going to do is allow me to start plotting points so i can left click here four times shift click and boom i've created a quad so you're drawing quads on this surface then i can just continue to do this and then add two and in order to get the face you you plot the points hold shift and left click then you can also hold ctrl left click to add or hold tab to pull out some edges now you can use tab and middle mouse to pull out edge loops or if you have an edge in here and want to get rid of it then you can hold ctrl shift and delete those are the main ones that i use but take a look here in the modeling toolkit and you can see the keyboard mouse shortcuts and there's a ton of them here so now that i have a model that i don't have to worry about form i can just practice topology and then not only practicing but if you take a look you know i've covered this in the the hammer boy modeling series that i did but you want to make sure to reference topology good edge flow here's some samples that i just pulled off just from the internet when searching for a good topology and then i'd also just do some sketching right sketch down the topology just kind of plan your topology then you can get back into maya and just start working on you know having the you know ability just to focus solely on topology and when i started doing a lot of re-topple work that was when my topology game just immediately immediately improved right so and it's just one of those things i'm not saying you know just you know because that's the whole workflow of being able to sculpt and then re-topple or create you know very high high detailed models and then re-topo later and so you you have these types of workflows right and so you know you're starting to work on the eye loop and then now you're working on the face loop or the mouth loop here and you're just kind of going around working on the model right so this will allow you to just again focus solely on topology and edge flow and allow you to to get a lot of um ground covered there it's kind of that focused focused practice and then when you get back to the regular modeling with your you know the regular modeling where you have to do everything then that's where it's going to be you know helpful or you're starting to combine all those techniques once you start becoming really really pro proficient at topology right so you can see i'm just kind of going and looping but you know you don't have to pull in sculpts you can simply take old models that you've done so here i have this character model that i did so i'll move him over duplicate him and then i'll get out of make live mode and what i can do here is subdivide him a couple of times like so and you know this you know i can work with this or i can go in here and do a remesh like this and so now we just get like this messy topology version re-topologized version that we can work with or you know you could even use the optimize to which is going to really reduce the the mesh here and you want to get that by going to mesh reduce and then you can say like if you know 50 or whatever and then apply that and that's really going to change the topology and the whole purpose of just doing this is so you have a completely remeshed and re-triangulated version of your model so that way you know you're not like you know trying to carry over the bad topology that you had previously so then yeah i can go ahead and make this guy live and i can quad draw and i can just start you know start working um with him uh here all right so definitely using this to practice your topology uh use models that you've created before use models from your friends or models you find from online and it's just gonna help uh things overall all right so that about covers it those are the five tips so to recap the five different tips the first one is localizing topology so i go over here that's having the ability to take one face and convert it into you know three four five six faces and going back down uh all the same right so we're doing exactly something like that here so localizing topology having the ability to go uh up and down in faces whenever you want the next tip was splitting triangles and n-gons splitting those faces so you're able to keep good quads so simple like that and that's for cutting across things throughout the model the next one was focusing on form and focusing on only adding in topology that you need so remember using the surface shader so if i just hold right click and then assign a new material and looking at surface shader and just making sure my edges are adding to my form and avoiding what's called dead edges the next one is edge flow making sure that you have good edge flow and face loops uh to hold your your form right because i mean i i could have just you know not added those facelifts for to support the geometry here but without that look if i now redo that look how it's going to hold this sharp part of the blade all right and then the last one is practicing topology with uh with quadra and re-toppling all right so that's definitely one that helped me just immediately get better i'm just focusing on understanding topology and uh and whatnot and edge flow all right so i hope this helped i want to kind of keep this short sweet and to the point if you guys want me to cover some more topology tips and topology workflows in future videos let me know i can get uh into more advanced detail otherwise if you found this helpful always you know subscribe like and comment always helps the channel grow you guys so with that take care and i'll see you around

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 17,324

Rating: 4.9930372 out of 5

Keywords: 3D, modeling, 3d art, autodesk, maya, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, hard, surface, tips, workflow, speed, improve, best, bumpy, fix, intro, understand, understanding, edge, flow, basics

Id: rwW6HpOcAuw

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021