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

Improving Topology Using UV Maps

With the basics of topology and how it deforms taken care of, there is one last consideration to be made when laying out the topology of a model. That last consideration is how the material is going to be applied to it. There are a few ways to do this, but the most consistent way of doing this is by UV unwrapping and applying image textures to the surface of the model.

This chapter will start by introducing you to a UV map, and then we will move on to explaining how it works. Once we have an understanding of the UV map itself, we will move on to its relationship to the topology of the model. Then, we will learn how to check a model’s UV map and improve it.

In this chapter, we will be learning about the following subjects:

  • What is a UV map?
  • Ensuring clean topology for clean UV maps
  • Unwrapping the mesh
  • Improving unwraps