edge flow for hard surfaces

I am working on my edge flow and keeping proper spaces between each face.
I was wondering, a lot of people to box modeling or extrude in tutorials.

I was wondering, can you take one plane and bridge it to another plane, then insert the exact loop cuts to have even spacing and then just align up to the reference?

I know this wont work for organic but figured to ask about this, so I can start getting better.
I know I still have to make my quads smaller. this is why I am having problems with edge flow and applying displacement surfaces for high poly meshes.

lined up, I just wanted to show a quick demo of what I mean before somebody answered. as you can see by the circle vertices. already getting out of align. I just found out though about the s axis and 0 key to align, maybe that will help?

sorry for the bad hand writing, Hard to write in paint to circle and mark things.

Quite frankly, I think your mesh is much too dense already.

Rule of thumb: As many vertices as necessary, but as few as possible. The fewer vertices you use, the easier it will be to fine tune the shape, because you don’t have to constantly push that many vertices around. And it is also easier to keep them aligned…

If you should need more geometry later, you can always subdivide / loop cut. But at first make sure to block out your form with very simple geometry.

I keep thinking more quads better detail but I know what you mean.

I was wondering though, even with a less mesh , how do people keep there quads evenly spaced? I was doing one edge at a time and typing in the same extrude numbers but that was taking forever. Wondering if there is a number you can type in or something that will keep that extrude until you change it?

thanks

Why don’t you use curves as much as possible? It’s usually easier to get what you want.

Looptools Gstretch, Bsurfaces.

I was trying curves in Maya and found them easy for creating windows for a car nut outlining the car curves was hard. I only practiced for a day though, so should give it longer.

I’ve been learning about Blender for almost a year but, learning 3dmax, may and Blender UI along with trying to understand Photoshop and after effects and UDK, it has slowed down my learning and sometimes, find myself hitting wrong keys. I do like Maya UI but Blender has everything, composting, movie editor etc, so I decided recently to practice my topology and composting until i decide what software I can start a carrier with.

The different shortcuts will mess you up,i’m learning mudbox and i want to learn UDK but the price is a major turnoff.

why is this necessary?
you’re limiting yourself by imposing a weird restriction that doesn’t add value. just extrude and subdivide where it makes sense (whenever you come across any details in the model). but to answer your question, i would just extrude an edge until it fills the requird space then subdivide with loop cuts (ctrl+r). you get evenly spaced cuts this way

thank you, I was wondering the evenly scaled quads because before I had very long quads so when I used a placement map it wasn’t working so I had to crank up my normal map to and still had very low bump geometry because the quads to were to long even though I put in a lot of subdivisions (w) key, . everything changed when I started doing more subdivides to get my quads to work better with the displacement. before my quads were like -------------------------------- this long on a plank so it had no geometry to bend.

also, I though evenly spaced quads give better detail? I just found a tutorial on hard surface modeling so maybe that will help me with quads for this type of project since I know human topology is organic and has a certain flow along all the certain areas.

I’m still looking for good tutorials on both hard-surface and organic topology. I have found goo tutorials on rerouting topology for loop holes and such but nothing showing the difference and how the hard surface topology looks like. so i look up wire frames on Google images of say a car door but it’s smoothed so I don’t really get a good look at the geometry.

I started noticing that and how to apply image planes etc. some software you just load a reference image, 3dmax you can put it on a plane of it dimensions and with blender I couldn’t figure out how to fix my side ortho view until after like 5 hours and found somebody scaling up the reference image by cube they placed in the front ortho.