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

Identifying grids on a complex shape

We are going to be using this object shaped like a pair of pants in Figure 2.29 as our practice shape.

Figure 2.29 – Practice shape

Figure 2.29 – Practice shape

In our example, we will be using a tool called snapping. Snapping snaps your selection to an edge, face, vertex, or volume. The example uses snapping to faces. Snapping to faces can be enabled by pressing the magnet at the top of the viewport, and the options can be shown by pressing the arrow next to the magnet. The settings can be seen in Figure 2.30.

Figure 2.30 – Snap To menu

Figure 2.30 – Snap To menu

To start, we will identify the defining shapes of the mesh. All we are looking for are the specific areas that we know we want the edges to line up with. These areas are highlighted in Figure 2.31.

Figure 2.31 – Areas to line our vertices to

Figure 2.31 – Areas to line our vertices to

The next steps are going to give you an overview of the general process we are going to use...