Why ngons are BETTER than quads for hard surface

this is probably going to be the single most important video i i think you could watch this year for 3d um it's similar to things i made before but i don't think i've made anything on this scope i'd highly suggest you sit down grab a coffee and just watch this video don't model don't do anything just watch this video i think this will give you a completely different mindset in the world of 3d so it is on the ngon and quad workflow i've talked about this a lot but in this video i'm going to actually model something with ngons and booleans and i'm going to model something using quads and sub-surface model the same exact thing and if this video doesn't hammer in the fact that n-gons do not matter i don't know what will so i'm gonna i'm gonna show you something that might blow your mind so if this video provides you any sort of value we'd really appreciate if you hopped over to our patreon we have exclusive monthly tutorials decal packs i will give you our project files for the tutorials we'll critique your art and models to help you become a better artist everything over there is super valuable to improving your 3d skill set so if you're not yet on our patreon you can get those perks for as little as two bucks a month so check it out link in the description let's get on with the video so what i'm gonna do is model something really quickly using hard ops box cutter and gone boolean workflow right i don't want you to model with me i want you to watch this video so i'm just going to do this really quick what i want to do is first of all hit this with a chamfer i am going to go pretty fast on this because this is not a modeling tutorial this is me making a point tutorial so i'm going to make this really quick i'm going to hit that with a mirror coming to the side come on to this bevel cue bevel let's do i guess 10 segments is fine we're going to hit it like that we'll fix the shading in a bit i want to come to the side here hit this with an n gone cut oops come through here do something like that and then on the back i want to run a small little bevel here we'll give this like 10 segments and come on here get this like 10. come on here give this like 10. very simple straight to the point model i'm also going to hit it with a bevel so i think i'll hit it with a bevel with a heart of normals turned on and the shading is still fighting with me so i'll use a weighted normal instead so let me bevel i'm not going to use heart of normal is going to use way to normal to clean up all the shading and here we go here is our completed model so we'll get back to this in a bit but i um i don't want to talk anymore about this right now so this took me what 30 seconds to model did not take me long at all yes we do have ngons we're going to get back to that talk in a bit now i want to model the same exact thing using quads and surf this is probably the workflow you were taught by you know the usual 3d modeling instructors on youtube blender grew if you guys saw a blender guru's chair tutorial for example fantastic tutorial he shows you ngon or i'm sorry quad and subsurf workflow if you've watched cg masters any of the big guys you've definitely seen the usual subsurf and quad workflow which is what we're about to do right here i'm going to model the same exact piece or at least close to the same exact piece dimensions might be like microscopically off but yeah i'm going to model the same piece using all quads so to do this we're going to come in here the cube this is actually a bit trickier which is why i always say like understanding topology is the most important thing you can do whether you use quads whether you use ngons understanding topology is so important so all right we have to kind of think about this analytically how do we want to make this model in terms of quads so all quads so the first thing we need to do we're not going to deal with the bevels at all subsurf will actually round out the edges for us so we only want to get the base block out so i'm going to hop into side view here take this edge and i'm just going to try to match the curvature as closely as possible so we'll do something like that and then we're going to hit this with the inset boolean again now just to be very precise i'm just going to reuse the cutter that we had over here so i'm just going to duplicate this piece and then make it roughly as wide hit it with this and then run an inset kind of like that let me hide all of those and let me also shade this thing flat we'll do that in a second all right so we need to apply this boolean here and now that we have this little inset detail we can join these all into a quad right now this is like a big you know n gone right here so if we join these corners we'll have quads so we'll do that all the corners need to be joined and then we'll shade this as flat so that way we have like a block out and then hit this with a symmetry to the other side okay so we have that looks good now we need is this little hole detail here on the front now this is where it gets kind of tricky we have to really think about how we would get this in so if we're using a quad based destructive workflow we'd have to you know deal with loop cuts and things like that so we don't really want to use booleans unless they help us like the boolean for the inset right here helped us which is why we used it but i don't think a boolean right here is going to really help us so what i'm going to do is drop a loop right here roughly and let's move it over a bit so we have that let's also drop a loop and try to match it oops wrong side drop a loop here right click s z and then zero to keep it straight i'm gonna actually snap it right to that vertex so it's roughly the same height for that hole okay we have that and i also want to all right i want to get a loop going through here but we have one big n gone so to sort out this n gone we'd basically have to turn it into a quad so we'd run a knife k click this press the c key press the z key to cut through click enter same for this area and just like that we have a quad now up here we do not have any sets of quads so um we could deal with that in a second i mean we don't have to do it right now so let's wait on it okay what i want to do though is get a loop going through here but i want to make sure this is matching roughly this curvature here so we're not going to actually bevel this area the subserve is going to end up taking care of that that's what subsurf does it rounds out the mesh for us so we use proximity loops to balance out how round it is and creases as well so we have this that's exactly what i want i want to make sure this is also straight but i think it is so there shouldn't be an issue there okay we have that let's go ahead and hit it with a symmetry so that way the same effect is on both sides and then we can simply make everything quads let's first of all cut through here join this up join this up hit it with another symmetry and now we have all quads right there um we have an n gone on this area so no big deal hit it with a knife hit it with a symmetry i am going to go fast on this video like i said i just want you guys to observe so now we have pretty much all quads here except for these two perhaps i do want to keep these even so let me actually snap that to keep it straight and then we can join this up join these up as well join these up join these up so now we need this hole down here so since we've kind of traced out where the hole is going to be using our edge loops right here we can simply take these faces and delete them out so x and then delete faces and now we have to patch this up so the easiest way to do this would be to use our vertex snapping tool e and then z we'll fill this in we're going to need to patch this area up so let me continue on a knife cut down through there so we can join that up this is going to be another area we need to sort so let me first of all e z fill this in we're trying to fill in what we can for right now to make it easier to work with so we have that i think that one's already filled in this can be filled in as well and this can be it's going to be an issue so let's continue a knife cut through here fill in these edges fill in these edges and just like that we have our hole so let's hit it with a symmetry alt x and then symmetrize and we basically have the same effect this is a bit wider here than it is here but who cares i mean it's the same thing besides the size so we have that we're still working in all quads which is good exactly what i want so we have that detail now we want this detail here in the back so to get that detail we could you know try to use loops and mess with it this way it's just going to be a pain guys i'm telling you you can just use booleans and re-topo the boolean so i'm going to steal the cutter for the back piece where is it let me turn on the cutter's collection and i'm going to steal this cutter right here i'm going to duplicate it move it over and we're going to get roughly the same size cut do that let's also make sure this is shaded properly uh to get it to shade properly we have to first apply that boolean and then if we shade it flat it'll actually replicate okay so we have that but the issue here is is kind of this going on right now so we have to figure out how exactly can i get this into quads well use the good old knife tool i think what we could do on this area a few different solutions we could slide this one up like that we could slide this one up like that i think this is going to be a bit harsh for the overall subsurf so what i think i might do is simply we could have also repositioned the cut to a better location but i'm trying to match the original one we could cut like that make a cut like this and now we have quads and we're going to need to join these up right here now for the back we're going to have to do that and then for this area hit something like that and then hit it with a symmetry to that side and we have some extra geo here we don't really need dissolve that out and now we have is essentially the block out for this piece right here minus the bevels and minus the rounded edges now we need to get that using a sub surf modifier notice how already we're probably a few minutes in on this one whereas with this one we modeled it in 30 seconds or so this one we're a couple minutes into so i think part of my point has already been made here with the time constraints okay so we have this now we need to do since we have the block out we need to run a sub surf on here and get this cleaned up so i'm going to press ctrl 3 and run a sub surf with three just to make it nice and smooth and generally on hard surface with sub surf we don't really want to use auto smooth kind of depends in general don't need it turn it off and now what i'm going to do is simply the usual stuff you probably learned when you were first learning blender so notice how the subsurf actually makes the edges nice and rounded like we have on this one and we can get the same exact effect by simply using proximity loops and proximity loops are going to act just like the bevels basically so we can use these to kind of tighten areas up we have that can hit it with that we need to tighten this area up and now notice how these bevels right here are really really tight we're going to do the same thing using proximity loops make this area really really tight so we're going to do that this bottom portion i think we could do something like that this area here we're going to pull in this area here i'm making these as tight as possible notice how we have some pinching this is another point guys like sub surf is not not prone to um having having bad shading i mean shading is going to be bad whether you have quads or not it's how you manage the topology so um this one right here is caused by the pole kind of stretching so we'll pull that in make it tight and blender's happy okay so it looks like we have an n gone down here we forgot to sort so join that up and also we have this right here evidently so let me just hit it with that and [Music] symmetrize over okay so that looks good now for this upper area okay what's going on here i think we might have an interior face problem let me turn off the subsurf briefly and take a look i think that is our culprit yes that is definitely our culprit so you need to make sure that passes all the way through okay then we'll symmetrize all right that's fixed now we can come up here make this area really tight come in here make this area really tight same for the front okay looks like we have an n-gon that we forgot about so no big deal i'm going to drop that in going to join that up hit it with a symmetry to save time and then what we're going to do is um dissolve re-add the loop add the loop again pull this down boom have that okay looking pretty good did i pull that one in yet i don't think i did okay so we have that it's pretty much looking similar to what we have before so this one i'm gonna do two i think something is not happy with me though it's the way this is routed not too worried about it going control r control b hit it with a manual bevel like that turn that back on there we go this area hitting it with that this area hitting it with that this one we're going to have to ctrl r e to flip to this side to line it up i'm going to we already did the bottom so we have that this area we're going to need to tighten up by pulling in and we're getting closer this needs to be tightened let's actually do control r control b to make it nice like that this is a little bit too tight do we ah i see the issue i beveled a bit too much right there that should be all right but just for the sake of consistency blender will even out that loop more manually for us so we do that a little bit hectic in here going to just kind of hold this a bit by dropping in two make that a bit more round and nice looking so we have that and also on this one that's fine i was gonna remove the sharps but i think they're already gone so we're getting close let me symmetrize for anything i may have missed so we have that control 4 is not really making much of a difference so i think we're just about done here i'm going to do one of those i'm going to do one of these and then once again consistency will hit that with a symmetry now we basically have the same model here if you wanted to get the nice rounded area on the front and on these back areas you'd have to simply play with these loops a little bit and move them around like move them away so that way the subserve can naturally round it i'm just trying to you know run through this process so you can do that if you want but my point here is i got the same exact result using n-guns in probably a fourth of the time this is how you can quickly model stuff using ngons this is how you can quickly model stuff not quickly this is how you can model stuff using quads this is the workflow most of you were taught the subsurf quad and destructive workflow the worst part about this is there's not really room for change if i want to quickly move around to cut move it into a different position this one gives me the freedom to do that i can go in here grab this move it in scale it move it up i can do whatever i want because i'm working non-destructively that way whereas on this one i mean i can't i could you know come in here if i wanted to and maybe like lift this and move this but it's like why you know you're gonna do that and wonder what the hell am i doing with my time this workflow right here using ngons not only is the is the poly count not that really matters in this case not only is the poly count low here the one the geometry is really elegant even though we have n-gons this is just super high poly obviously if you're doing a game asset you'd bake this onto the low poly base mesh for this one but like right here some people are going to come in and say oh well what about with ngons you could do i'm sorry what about with the game assets that is well for game assets you could come in here and do the quad workflow and bake it down whatever or on this one you could do like all my other videos show for game assets you come in here you get a nice even distribution of n-gons you triangulate make sure the shading looks good using a weighted normal modifier bring it into the game engine you're going to have absolutely zero problems so obviously for concept designing running ngons and booleans and whatnot i think everyone would agree universally this workflow is fine but then people still come in and they're like well why what about the topology right you're the question's valid what about the topology what what point are you making here some programs i know do not handle n-gons none of those programs i use and none of those programs most of you use so for those commenters that come in yes there are minor exceptions for certain engines that i don't touch and probably will never touch but in 99 of situations this workflow is not only more efficient it's um it's more fun it gives you a much cleaner result because you can really handle the curvature and the convexity of the edges very nicely using bevels whereas with this one it's very finicky you have to do a lot of destructive labor here move loops around the only positive side with this is you can easily define how big your bevels are but i mean you can do the same thing here but if you want to have like a in a little bit of a different type of bevel maybe it's a bit more rounded up on the top compared to the bottom this is like the only situation in which that might be a bit easier to do than it is on here because by default the bevel is going to bevel over evenly so that is the one of the only downsides i guess other than that game assets and end guns completely fine i've made videos on this triangulated okay make sure the shading is good and make sure the bakes don't have any artifacts and you can use this in game engines everything gets triangulated anyways in a game engine so this workflow still reigns supreme in concept art obviously this workflow is the go-to as well this is just this is extremely powerful for learning and understanding topology one of the best things any 3d artist can do is understand topology i do have a lot of people coming in and they go straight to the endgone workflow which is fine my partner you went right into add-ons and gone workflow and learned topology just fine the issue is when you start relying on this workflow and i think that's another thing is a lot of people that hammer quad workflow are trying to teach correct techniques and correct apology and i say correct loosely because how do you define correct right people are trying to teach an understanding and in-depth understanding of topology and that is why i enjoy learning this workflow and recommend you understand quad workflow because once you understand the rules you can bend them very easily using workflows like this so i think there's a lot of people out there that might be very comfortable with this workflow but if i ask them to model this using all quads they'd have no clue what to do and that's where i think the quad junkies out there and i would agree because a lot of people force bad habit by not learning both every single person needs to understand quads understand how to use them understand how to bend the rules of quads and start working with end guns to get similar results and make your workflow easier more efficient more fun that is the number one thing you as a 3d artist can do learn quad workflow understand the tools understand topology and as you model more and do more projects topology topological understanding is going to increase a lot even just doing the good old hard surface workflow has dramatically increased my understanding of topology so both workflows will increase it but if you can make this you should be able to make this so i really want you guys to start understanding topology learning it and not relying all the time on bad topology because if you have bad topology and don't know how to handle it that is why a lot of game developers are saying i want all quads in your portfolio i want to see clean topology i want to see a good game asset the reason they're asking you for that is they want to understand or know that you understand topology once they know that you understand topology then they're going to let you come in and bend the rules to actually get something that works and looks good so that's like another big reason a lot of companies say i want to see a good topology in your portfolio because that is the way it should be taught you should understand how to model things cleanly and then bend the rules so the reason people are asking you guys for quads and you know for game engine yeah game engines game assets if an employer is saying i want to see quads the reason they're asking you for that is either one you're using an engine that does not support n-gons or two they want to make sure you understand topology and how to model destructively with quads before they trust you to be able to use n-gons which which are traditionally considered as bad workflow so i'm on the side of pretty much everyone i just i'm logical right i'm logical as to when you should use a workflow when you shouldn't and why this might be a bit more beneficial to you than this workflow at least at the beginning of your modeling career so i hope this video helped hope it gave you some insight and showed you can get a damn similar result using quad workflow but i mean even with this workflow the shading is arguably worse than this workflow so there's even downsides to using all quads so hope this gave you some insight i know i kind of went on a rant over at the end but i think it'll really help you guys out so my challenge for you is to for the next few days i want you guys to model something simple using the main techniques i teach on my channel ngons booleans and bevels i want you to model something fun like this and then i want you to challenge yourself to model the same exact thing all with quads all with sub surf understand edge flow understand subdivision surfaces understand how you can position different areas uh different edges on your mesh in different areas to get different results and that's how you'll really have an in-depth understanding of topology and how to get yourself a clean portfolio and a deep deep understanding of 3d that's my challenge for you i think it'll help you guys out a lot hope the video gave you some insight i'd really appreciate a like and a comment if this kind of gave you some relief that what you're doing is not bad and not necessarily not bad not good just you know an option so if this helped you out i'd really appreciate a like and if you're not subscribed i know a lot of you guys get recommendations to my channel which might make you think you're subscribed but you might not be so don't miss out on anything hit the subscribe button the notification bell i'll keep making cool videos like this and aside from that join us on patreon there's my plug for the video and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 52,745

Keywords: blender, ngons, vs, quads, for, hard, surface, better, why, modeling, non, destructive, 3d, subdivision, modifier, guru, chair, beginner, loop, shading, distortion, fix, tutorial, game, josh, gambrell, ponte, ryuurui, blenderbros, masterxeon1001, hardops, boxcutter, bevel, boolean, baking, normal

Id: svS9V2iAesA

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021