Book Image

Squeaky Clean Topology in Blender

By : Michael Steppig
5 (1)
Book Image

Squeaky Clean Topology in Blender

5 (1)
By: Michael Steppig

Overview of this book

This book is an introduction to modeling and an in-depth look at topology in Blender, written by a Blender topology specialist with years of experience with the software. As you progress through its chapters, you’ll conquer the basics of quad-based topology using triangles and Ngons, and learn best practices and things to avoid while modeling and retopologizing. The pages are full of illustrations and examples with in-depth explanations that showcase each step in an easy-to-follow format. Squeaky Clean Topology in Blender starts by introducing you to the user interface and navigation. It then goes through an overview of the modeling techniques and hotkeys that will be necessary to understand the examples. With the modeling basics out of the way, the next stop on our journey is topology. Working through projects like a character and a sci-fi blaster, the book will illustrate and work through complex topology problems, and present solutions to those problems. These examples focus on deforming character models, non-deforming hard surface models, and optimizing these models by reducing the triangle count. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify the general flow of a shape's topology, identify and solve issues in your topology, and come out with a model ready for UV unwrapping, materials, and rigging.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started with Modeling and Topology
6
Part 2 – Using Topology to Create Appropriate Models

Part 1 – Getting Started with Modeling and Topology

Topology is the base of all modeling operations. The quality of a model’s topology has a direct effect on the quality and ease of use of the final model. Decisions regarding topology made at the early stages of a model can plague the whole modeling process and beyond, leaving problems that you may have to deal with every time you use the model. That is what makes an understanding of topology so imperative from the start.

We will be looking at topology in Blender, so a quick look at modeling will be our first objective. Once we have an understanding of general modeling in Blender, we will go straight into the fundamentals of topology. In each chapter, we will look at new rules to help guide us in the topology process. These are basic universal rules that apply to any software, with examples done in Blender.

The topics will include things to consider when modeling and then when deforming your model. Finally, we will...