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

Introduction to retopology

To start off, we should talk about retopology. Retopology is a process in which you modify or completely redo the topology of a mesh. In Figure 5.1, you can see a mesh with bad topology before retopology on the left, and then after retopology on the right:

Figure 5.1 – Comparison of mesh with bad topology (left) and mesh after retopology (right)

Figure 5.1 – Comparison of mesh with bad topology (left) and mesh after retopology (right)

When approaching a retopology, it can be helpful to look at good examples of the process. You can see one of these references in Figure 5.2.

Figure 5.2 – An example of a topology reference that I have made

Figure 5.2 – An example of a topology reference that I have made

These are nice to get an idea of where our defining loops might be, but when modeling anything other than a basic human, the topology will likely be different. That is why we chose a bit more of a unique model to retopologize. This will give us a chance to look at the reasons we put the topology where we do and form a practical understanding...