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

Topology for cloth simulations

Just like normal deformations, cloth and soft body simulations follow the three deformation rules as well. While we will not get into the specific settings to apply to a soft body mesh, it is important to understand how the topology is going to react.

To start, subdivide a plane to make sure that our mesh has enough geometry to work with. Because the cloth simulation can be affected by the modifier stack, we should do as much of the subdividing as we can in the Modifiers tab. Be careful with the Subdivision modifier though – adding too many subdivisions can massively slow down your computer or outright crash Blender. We can see the Subdivision modifier in Figure 3.45.

Figure 3.45 – Subdividing the plane

Figure 3.45 – Subdividing the plane

To start out, do the following:

  1. Add a Subdivision modifier set to Simple. This allows us to add more geometry without also smoothing the mesh.
  2. To add a Cloth modifier, open the Modifier dropdown...