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

Ensuring clean topology for clean UV maps

Thankfully, there is not too much more we need to think about when laying out our topology for UV maps so long as we have followed our other topology rules. So first, we will look at the rules that apply to UV mapping most. One of the more painful topology issues to work around is when the topology is not flowing with the geometry properly. In Figure 4.25, I have two planes that I want to unwrap:

Figure 4.25 – Planes for unwrapping

Figure 4.25 – Planes for unwrapping

The one on the left has jagged edges going left to right, and the plane on the right has straight edges like a normal grid. If we split these in half and look at them in the UV editor in Figure 4.26, you can see how the jagged edges intersect our texture at awkward angles:

Figure 4.26 – Jagged UV map (left), straight UV map (right)

Figure 4.26 – Jagged UV map (left), straight UV map (right)

If we wanted the grid pattern to line up perfectly with our plane, we would not be able to use a jagged pattern...