Would you consider this to be good topology?
I’m back to blender after a long hiatus trying to revise everything I knew.
Are there any visible flaws in topology of this model? If you have any tips on how to improve this let me know.
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Instead of using a Catmull-Clark level 4 and edge crease, why not model this particularly angular object without subd?
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I’m no expert and I’m going blind, so it’s hard for me to actually see if there is any difference in height/etc… so most of the mesh seems to have unnecessary stuff, I would say about 33% can be removed… oh wait it is level 4 subdivision (modifier) 
but according to the icons you turned off edit preview, so that is the base mesh without subdivision, still way too much unneeded verts and edges
Most likely this post is completely useless, sorry to waste your time
It depends on what you wanna do with it.
for some cases, it seems fine
for some cases, it will be overkill
for some cases, it’s lacking in detail
If you wanna be uptight about all quad topology, you’ve got some pretty obvious triangles that could be mitigated.
If you’re concerned about poly count, you’ve got a ton of excess control rails.
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As far as i know Quad topology is just for workflow and neatness 
It’s great topology don’t listen to boolean lovers 
Yes it might not be necessary for still renders on flat surfaces, but trust me its better to get in the habit of clean subd modeling and learn to have good topology in all cases. You’ll be thankful down the road and will open up more career opportunities for you.
I guess I was just trying to keep it quad based and make it possible to run the loop cuts through the whole mesh. But damn your model looks clean. I’m gonna try to clean it up just to see the differnce.
Again, it depends.
Which is better:
how about now:
UV mapping is much easier with quads. Any sort of deformation can be much more predictable with quads.
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By clean topology you mean quad based mesh with minimal amount of triangles?
Bad in general. You have a lot of geometry that does not contribute to holding the form. Do I have assets like that in my scenes? Sure, every time. So it’s OK. But if you are asking about topology specifically, you don’t need most of the loops and could probably lower poly count by 30-40% and have absolutely same result, or add bevels on the edges instead.
If you shared the .blend, I can show you what I mean.
Both, but quad based mostly. Thing is, people will always list cases where quad based topology is good: twist, sculpt, anim, rig, etc. But the main point is that there is not a case where quad topology is bad, so its always worth pursuing.
Except… game engines. There you don’t care about triangles and want as low poly as you can get. Main difference is “online rendering” and “offline rendering”. When you just render animation or still shots render time doesn’t really matter, you’ll wait, or get render farm or something, but for games you need to render constantly so lower the better.
Otherwise, you might not always need to twist objects, but you might decide to do that in mid project, or you might decide to sculpt bumps or cracks on, and you’ll always have option. But the main thing is that subd modeling takes a lot of skill, this is a fairly simple model, but for complex shapes subd can be difficult, but if you’re good at subd you’re good at everything modeling.
That would ruin equal distribution of faces and will make model unsculptable. In production environment what you describe would be bad model for hero prop. It would be acceptable for background item, but if we’re talking about “the best” I think this is the best. And its better to learn how to model best when you’re learning.
Of course. But good topology also means good for the purpose! Are you going to do much sculpting on a cassette? No. If you are, you should increase the density of topology, sculpt, then retopologize.
Also the holes don’t have enough topology to look round:
“Good” topology depends on end use – for example, game models use trigons exclusively and are as low-poly as feasible. Animated models need topology that can be rigged to move with sufficient realism for the genre. Even still models shouldn’t have topological issues that can cause rendering artifacts (flipped normals, doubled geometry, visible poling, etc).
If the end use is unknown (and you haven’t said), what makes topology “good” is versatility. “Good” all-quads topology (no poles less than 3 or greater than 5, no poles on creased, tightly curved, or transition-between-flat-&-curved areas, even-as-feasible polygon distribution, loops follow function, etc) is considered by many to be best not only because it maintains ease of use when modeling, but because afterwards it’s the easiest to convert to the widest possible range of uses.
That model has substantial n-gons – wouldn’t in general be considered “good” topology, but it depends on what stage you’re at (some people spitball with n-gons, but you’d never know from their final output) and what you want to do with it. Blender-only background object? So long as it looks good (and Blender has some modifiers and other stuff that would help with that), no problem.
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Answer always going to be “depends on the project”, but that’s not a helpful answer to question asked by the OP here. If we’re talking about THE best topology this is the best. This topology will work always (but slower), others will in some cases.
Unrelated, I do stop-motion-like stuff, and for any object I have I do little sculpt passes, mess it up a little bit so that it looks handcrafted, bumpy, tiny. Things like that add to the scene. If you’re not doing ultra sci-fi computer stuff you usually do sculpt passes in production on everything up close, either by sculpting or vector displacement, and this topology is great for vector displacement as well.
Yes because this is pre-subd. Every hole should be 8 sided in subd.
Subdiv will give bad topology in this case, because it will create loads of geometry that is not needed. It will also make the form soft, which is not the case for such a hard edged object. I mean, subdiv is used a lot and it’s fine if you have to, but as far as topology goes, good topology is when it’s only what is needed to have the form and is still easy to work with. N-gons and triangles are fine as well as long as they don’t get in your way of selecting loops that you might want to select.
I like this. This is real world good topology. I would not complain if I had to use an asset like that. The only thing is missing bevels which are easy to add with a modifier(or the shader) and some unneeded geometry in the tape, but it’s easy to fix if needed. I love the use of n-gons. People are afraid of them, but this is how they are intended to be used. Blender works with n-gons just fine and they are perfect for this purpose. They wouldn’t be in many other case, but judging the situation per case is in my opinion the best thing to do.
Topology it’s allways a complex subject, in my opinion if it make the work it’s ok. In some cases you need a good topology to deform the mesh or you need that model to real-time view, but if you just want to do a simple render and nothing else and a model full of Ngons works that’s not a crime 
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This is how I would have done it. Quads and trying to clean the excesive geometry where I don’t need it. It’s not perfect but I hope this aport another vision. Have a good day! 
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