Change Your Understanding of Topology In Six Minutes

A good understanding of topology is a vital skill that every VFX artist should have in their arsenal. In this video, I'll break down a quick and simple method to change the edge count of any topology. Once you know how to connect an odd and an even number of faces, you can create clean topology for any mesh.

[Keavon]

Tip: Use the "J" key to automatically connect two selected vertices by cutting through the surface with a new edge instead of using the knife tool (which can sometimes be inaccurate and create extra vertices).

[buxtehude]

Decoded: "Once you can do that, you can do anything."
Me: "Hold my beer, gonna start a restaurant now."

[DECODEDVFX]

Wow. I almost deleted this video before uploading because I thought it was crap 🤣

[Foxyzier]

Imagine modelling for several years now and find out about this :D

[ingogud]

Been a CG generalist for 20+ years and had many of these individual methods vaguely in recesses of my brain somewhere, but this makes it all make sense finally! I´m a 100% sure that this video will end up on every CG teacher's must-view playlist for decades to come!

[tetsuooshima]

wow I wish someone has explained this to me like 10 years ago, I still do it kinda randomly nowadays (and avoid topology work as much as possible haha). I never properly learnt this technique because well, that knowledge was hard to find. But I talk too much lol thanks for that video it's great

[Zephyroths]

I never knew understanding topology can be THAT MUCH of a game changer

[DiegoSilva-zmke]

This vídeo made me love retopology
My tricks
-Keep edges x4, x8, x12, x16 ...
-Make main loops first
-use the 3 to 1 edges
-patience, is like a game

[Alex-byzv]

Heya there DECODED. it's a good thing you didn't delete it. Just in case you didn't know, Andrew Price put a link to this video as a "great explanation of redirecting topology" in his notification email about his new "chair" tutorial. I've just got it a couple of hours ago, and there I found the link to this video. I'd like to think it's a very good thing. As for the video itself, I checked it out when you first uploaded it, and I think it's really great.

[yasinomidi]

Thanks, i really struggled with this and had a million loop cuts going everywhere, i knew there was a better way but i couldn't get it look nice in shade smooth or subdiv

[Charly_Chive]

Finally someone shows the proper way, with and actual example, Jeez!

[shiningaster]

I've struggling to get clean topology for a long while and you just solved that with a very simple explaination.
Seriously, thank you.

[BasicallyAnArtist]

This was 4 years ago but the methods you've shown in this video are very helpful! This is going to save me a lot of time down the road. I've been searching for something like this for a while and here it is. Thanks!

[kalvinpearce]

Not quite sure how I stumbled across this one but even as a programmer I found this incredibly clear and understandable. Thanks for helping me understand when my artists talk about retopologising and n-gons

[danimal]

OMG this just blew my mind.... topologizing a character for a game for the first time and of course i've already run into all these problems. Wow, thank you

[SianaGearz]

Things to keep in mind. Long and thin polygons will trip up Gouraud shader. It's not usually relevant today, but it was super relevant when you were targeting Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube era hardware and may still be relevant when targetting low-end mobile platforms.

More relevantly for today, Catmull-Clark subdivision trips up on triangles, so you're good on avoiding them. However it also trips up on odd-valence vertices. Normally in a pure quad mesh, every vertex has 4 edges connected to it, so the valence of the vertex is 4. You have built a bunch of 3- and 5-valence vertices in here, which are usually not as bad as tris outright, but will still cause waviness in the subdivided mesh output. Since pure 4-valence quad topologies are generally impractical, there's often no substitute for just winging it and taking the waviness and letting it be the model feature where necessary, building the topology adjustment around there.

I'm also not convinced that the industry should stick to Catmull-Clark subdivision invented in the 70s. I my experiments, i had the impression (but no mathematical proof) that the behaviour of the subdivision could be improved by introducing normal-based displacements that would depend on local topology and would also help the subdivision be somewhat volume preserving, since Catmull-Clark tends to deflate a lot. It's not like research ended there, there was Stam/Loop 2002 "Quad/Triangle Subdivision
".

[KotteAnimation]

This is amazing! Your knowledge and explanation was just perfect👍

[espenstoro]

This just revolutionized my game of cutting shapes into spheres. A life saver. Thank you.

[PinkeySuavo]

I paused at 0:08 and tried to recreate this. I had a hand with like 15 vertices loop trying to connect it to 6 vertices loop of the arm. I somehow managed to reduce 15~ vertices to 8 vertices and 6 vertices I increased to 8. Such satisfaction when I connected them! Although somehow the topology doesn't feel to look very good, but the overall result satisfies me. Thank you very much!

[dawne]

INCREDIBLE. I have been watching and reading so much, and they keep showing pictures and pre-cut planes etc... your 7 min demonstration changed my life. Thanks for being someone that doesn't keep fundamental industry concepts secret