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

How to retopologize shoulders

Before getting up to the shoulder, we have to extrude our wrist up to the elbow, then to the shoulder, just like our fingers. You can see the arms extruded and with loop cuts in Figure 6.28.

Figure 6.28 – Arms with loop cuts

Figure 6.28 – Arms with loop cuts

Now we can start on our shoulder. Just like our face and hand, we are going to start by laying out some guiding lines. Figure 6.29 shows the lines laid out for the shoulder.

Figure 6.29 – Shoulder with guiding lines

Figure 6.29 – Shoulder with guiding lines

And like the areas of detail before, we just need to fill these in, as in Figure 6.30.

Figure 6.30 – Shoulder filled in with faces

Figure 6.30 – Shoulder filled in with faces

With the shoulders roughed out, we can bring the neck down to the shoulders. For this model, I simply adjusted the loops on the collarbone to match the loops on the neck and did a straight connection, as shown in Figure 6.31.

Figure 6.31 – Head, shoulders, and arms connected with edges

Figure 6.31 – Head, shoulders...