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

Connecting the body parts together

For the chest, instead of just lines, we are going to use full faces. Because we have the sections already fully modeled, it can be helpful to visualize how the topology is going to react with full faces. Figure 6.37 shows what this looks like.

Figure 6.37 – Chest with full faces as guides

Figure 6.37 – Chest with full faces as guides

Again, these faces just outline the major shapes of the model, so that we can fill them in later. The filled-in model can be seen in Figure 6.38.

Figure 6.38 – The completely filled-in model without the legs

Figure 6.38 – The completely filled-in model without the legs

With that, we are almost done with the body. All that is left is to extrude the legs from the hip. All we have to do to achieve this is repeat what we did for the arms and finger:

  1. Extrude the mesh to each joint.
  2. Loop cut to get even quads.
  3. Then, inset the faces on the outside of the joint.

After extruding out the legs and using a shrinkwrap modifier as we did on...