I’m working on this hard-surface piece for a cake-mix and I’d love a second pair of eyes on the topology before I commit to the final bevel/sub-d workflow.
Specific areas I’m unsure about :
The edge flow where the top arm meets the vertical drop — messy poles/redirects?
Inner U-bend corner — will it pinch under Subdivision Surface?
Flat end caps — are the internal loops redundant?
Any tips on cleaning up the edge flow, especially around that “neck” transition, would be super helpful. Rip it apart — I want to learn!
At the risk of igniting a massive controversy, none of this matters for a hard surface asset that isn’t going to deform in any way. The topological purists will probably disagree, but for your use case, if it shades well and looks like the reference, that’s all that matters. You could spend a lifetime perfecting every vertex position and connection, and the end result would look exactly the same in render as what you have now
Quite agreed with joseph. The only real rule is, “does it look good?” If the answer is yes, its good.
The one thing I’ll add though, is, if you know you’re gonna subdivide it,
Inner U-bend corner — will it pinch under Subdivision Surface?
just subdivide it and see. Or, better yet, just start the whole mesh subdivided.
I won’t take this to finish, and i didnt pay super close attention to the reference, but with 5 minutes of modeling with the subdivision modifier on, I basically have the shape
and the subdivision modifier makes everything quads anyways, even if I had used triangles or ngons somewhere, if pleasing the quad purists is important to you.
