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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to mark seams, UV-unwrap your mesh, and apply a texture to a mesh to check your UV. We also understood where to put our seams when unwrapping and which topology rules affect UV unwrapping the most. By now, you should be able to use UV unwrapping to check your topology and know how to check the quality of your UV map.

UV unwrapping is the last point to check your topology before doing all of the materials and rigging if your model calls for those, so it is important that you catch any major issues here. Otherwise, you may need to redo a tremendous amount of work. With these last considerations you need when preparing for UV unwrapping taken care of, we should be ready to go straight into a more complex model. In the next chapter, we will take a look at a character’s head, and apply all of the topology rules we have learned in this chapter to that model.