Change Your Understanding of Topology In Six Minutes

I finally made a follow-up to this video. You can watch is here - https://youtu.be/m8JkR6tI_q4

Brilliant demonstration! Thanks

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

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).

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

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

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

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!

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

It's 3 AM, i don't use blender, I'm not a 3D artist. Why is this in my recommendation YouTube?

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

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.

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

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

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

Why am I here? I don't even do how to model. I can't understand but it seems very interesting.

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 ".

Absolutely blew my mind. Doing fingers is always a pain in the butt

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

This is probably the single most important video I've seen with regards to mesh modelling, I just wish I saw it earlier. Now I need to go and practice it over and over until it becomes second nature. I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for explaining it in such a simple way! It seems so obvious now and I feel stupid for not being able to figure it out myself.