I’m teaching myself about good topology, specifically good topology for animation. I’ve worked my way through William Vaughan’s Topology Workbook and a bunch of online video tutorials, so I understand the basics of creating an all-quad (or nearly all-quad) mesh. However, I now have a real world problem and I’m not sure of the best way to solve it…or even if it matters in the big scheme of things if I solve it.
I have a specific mouth bag that I want to use on a model, and that mouth bag has quite a few vertices. I’m temporarily keeping the mouth bag as a separate object from the face object. I plan to join the objects (and the vertices) of the face and mouth bag later on.
…this presents a challenge in creating a nearly-all-quad mesh. There’s quite a few extra vertices on the mouth bag compared to what the face needs, and I don’t want to make my mesh more complex than necessary. So I stopped the mouth faces from becoming too complicated by making faces around the mouth area that had up to eight vertices.
To me, this has what software engineers call a “code smell”…I feel like this is the wrong thing to do, but I’m not entirely sure of the right thing to do, either.
What’s the recommended best practice in a situation like this?
Simplify the mouth bag object so I’m only dealing with the number of vertices I want to deal with in the un-subdivided face mesh.
Leave things as-is, because it’ll be fine once I start animating the mesh (either because I didn’t create triangle faces or because I happened to pick an even number of vertices).
Make the face mesh topology more detailed to handle all of the vertices coming back from the mouth bag. This seems like a lot of extra work for not much benefit (at least, not with a model that is as geometrically simple as this one), and kind of defeats the purpose of having a simple mesh that can be subdivided via a modifier.
Some other option I haven’t considered…?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
you should simplify, delete all these vertical edges on the lips in order to only keeps quads… Also I’m not convinced by the whole topology, check some tutorials about how to model faces, you can see that the edges draw a circular flow around mouth and eyes, it will allow you to easily add edges and to have a mesh that will work fine for animation:
The answers given are good advice for modeling human heads–not an easy task. However, there are times when you are modeling other things were you can run into the issues you show. In general, it is useful to be able to convert the N-gons you show, without complicating the rest of your model, and without using triangles. In your model, you have several N-gons with five edges on one side and one edge on the opposing side. Practice fixing issues like this. See the attached image as an example. Good luck.
That’s an interesting technique, @Vince_Bly. I will practice that.
I ended up reducing the number of vertices around the mouth to get around this issue and make it all quad, but I will keep that technique in mind for when I run into that situation again.
You’re right that this isn’t a human head – it’s a cartoony, cariactured dog head. I went back and redid much of the topology after @moonboots’s original comments. It seems that because this was not quite a human face but a cartoony face that was based on spheres, I had forgotten to apply the principles that I (theoretically) know regarding laying out topology in a human face.
Using the first image that @moonboots posted as a guide, I put better loops around the eyes, mouth, and cheeks. I couldn’t follow all of the loops exactly because of the way the head was constructed, but I think it’s an improvement. It’s now all 100% quad except for the “pie of triangles” at the very center of the nose.
I’m still working on it, so comments and suggestions are welcome:
Hi @simplecarnival, that’s much better. You asked for suggestions, so I examined your mesh and there are two polys, on top of the head, that are not “proper” quads. See the left panel of the attached drawing. The poly shown and the one to it’s left have an issue. As you can see in the middle panel, the circled middle vertex is, at best, in a straight line with the two end vertices. The algebraic sum of the angles of a quad must be greater than 270 degrees or there can be problems. I’ve exaggerated the position of the vertex in the right panel so you can see the problem. (You may have to zoom in to see it). The easy solution is to just move the vertex down a bit.
I had assumed because there were four vertices that it was automatically considered a quad, but what you’re saying makes sense. I’ll move the vertex down a bit to make it look more like a quad instead of a triangle with four vertices.
@Vince_Bly – I have incorporated this technique elsewhere in my model but I’m wondering…is there any sort of add-on that can generate this sort of topology automatically? In other words, if you’re modeling and you have six points on one side and want to work your way down to two points on the other side…is there some way that this can be automatically generated under most circumstances? It seems like something that could lend itself well to being automated.
Dissolve the extra edges and you will be fine, that being said, Blender is much better at dealing with extras than it once was but looking at your images, I would go for dissolving personally.
@simplecarnival, I don’t see it being automatic. However, as you get more experienced, you will find yourself doing it automatically. It would be worthwhile to examine meshes made by professionals of things like hands. Now that you know what to look for, you will see how the mesh changes between the palm and the fingers and thumb. Good luck.
