EVERYTHING You Need to Know About Topology 

Honestly, you're a gift to the 3D art community.

There's a bit of a difference between topology for characters, and topology for everyday objects like hard surfaces etc, and how you go about making it. This video is everything about topology for characters, mostly post sculpt. Just FYI for those watching. All good info though!

I wish I had this video when I was first starting out. I remember having to spend hours googling on topology for characters and best practices, but never getting much information out of the pros. I've learned a lot in practice, but this video has taught me a lot of things that I *didn't* know. One of the things I really appreciate is the breakdown in workflows between topology for real-time, and topology for offline rendering. I know the rules but never quite understood why those rules were in place, or how to apply them better.

Excellently structured vid. I’ve watched too many videos on topology that focus more on the tools rather than the methodology. This video is helping reinforce a lot of my learning thank you!

This is great. As I’m staring on a path of learning 3D Modeling for 3D Printing and finding if I just throw polygons at my model it will be bloated in file size or take forever to slice for printing. Great stuff baked in here

Great video! Currently prepping for an assignment where I'll be making a game-ready character, so your explanations from both perspectives of games and cinematics are super insightful, especially the tips on triangulation. In my degree (Game Design) they've mainly taught us from an animation perspective since the criteria have been based on the Creative Industries (Animation) degree, it's only in the past couple of years that they have been trying to factor in a games perspective.

Such a well made video Jay, the work you put into your channel shows! Picked up a copy of that stop staring book as well, thanks!

Absolutely the best explanation I've seen so far, and you've set the bar so high I really doubt I'm going to find a better experience for a long time. PLEASE KEEP IT UP IM LOVING THE DEEP LEARNING AND THE WAY YOU EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. 💯 😎👍

Tremendous! I'm a techie doing hard surface models for engineering (but learning a little organic modeling for personal enrichment), and I learned so much from this lesson, even things that will apply to my hard surface work. Thank you for sharing your talent and experience so generously!

Hi J Hill. The best tutorial I've ever watched on Character Topology. I am using C4d and I have studies on human modelling. Maybe I know most of the elements you describe, but with this video, everything fell into place in my head. Thank you so much. Stay cool.

Two minutes in and I've just subscribed. I can tell this is going to be an amazing lesson.

at 16:45, its mentioned that the mesh will be subdivided. might interest some people as to why its subdivided. you subdivide a model for the deplacement map. deplacement will pull polygons to make details. so you start from low-ish polycount to animate, block out etc. and come final render, the renderer will subdivide the model and pull geo with help from the displacement map. in that sense, if you're not working with displacement map, you dont actually have to subdivide the model. example, stylistic 3D animations, cell shaded animations, cartoonish looking stuff etc, anything you can get away with a normal map, which makes fake bumps. (as opposed to displacement map, which makes real bumps)

Subscribed. I struggled to find a good tutorial on topology explanation on RU-vid until I came across this video. It explains the concept very effectively. I hope those learning 3D modelling discover this video first, avoiding any confusion caused by incorrect or inaccurate tutorials.

This video is golden! It's full of so much information, thank you!

Thanks for another great video J! Keep it up!

Thank you so much for your explaination. Your way of teaching and speaking is so clear!

this is such a complete video, great information all around character modeling, amazing. Have you thought of making a video about SubD modeling? Currently learning that style of modeling

Cool video and simple explanation of the topic. I would like to see more videos like that ! keep going that way =)

This is awesome. Can you go over modeling in different modes? Gimbal, perspective, normal? I'm a visual learner and would be great to see how you use these to model a project.

Thanks bro. I was trying to understand why I needed quads for game dev and this answered all my questions. Well done

I really appreciate your explanation of quads vs triangles based on the necessary development process. I have studied a lot of professional game models, seen so many triangles, so I use them in my work to do just what you say: end loops and save verts. However, when people call me out on it I never really know what to say because I know it's okay to do, but I didn't know why. Now I understand that triangles are only bad if a mesh needs to be subdivided predictably, such as for cinema rendering!

Extremely helpful video! Great job! I'm only starting to learn modeling, but I see myself rewatching this in the future, when I better understand things to polish my skills. Have a great day! x)

Great stuff, mate. Very helpful video! Thanks!

Thank you, this video is exactly what I was looking for ❤

Your videos are gold for anyone who wants to know the aspects of 3D in depth. I learned a lot thanks to you. You are clear in your explanations and pleasant to look at. thank you for your work

Your tutorial videos are amazing. I decided to go back to creating soft after 16 years. soft soft is so easy to get into, but also offers

that's the best video ever about topology! thank you, Jay!

Great content, very informative. thank you!

Thank you! Great job! Finally there's a video, that explains the whole topic from a to z!

Great video!! Covered everything really well subbed!!

Thank you so much for the free subscription, your work is extremely inspiring so here's hoping I can learn something new

All important information bundled and presented with style. Well done 👏

Thank you sir. I was having a hard time understanding topology. Such a nice job!

nice vid! When you talked about the grid lines and how they should ideally flow along creases and anatomy that will move certain ways, that made a whole lot of sense to my brain. comparing yours to the stock zbrush was also informative. Julie got ISSUES. heheheheh but then it was prob just a fast thing they added for people to play around with w/o animation in mind like you said. thx for the info!!!!

great clean and concise

Amazing video. Thanks for making it; I can feel the esoterica falling away a bit...

Congrats on 100k Jay. You have come so far and really deserve this.🎉🎉🎉

after hours of trying to understand topology you finally made it make sense. Thank you so much.

Edge flow is important but polygon construction is always dependent on the needs of production. What is the model being used for? There is clean topology and then there is efficient topology. Those two things are always going to be conflicting with each other because an efficient model means more loop termination points, which means more poles. Both types are "good" depending on those needs. Vfx models with hyper real deforms tend to have less poles but at the cost of denser, more uniform size polygons. This is because there are advanced deforms intended underneath. Muscles, bones, etc. You don't split the loops for the elbow bone, for example, because the location of that boney area will slide around realistically around the skin. An efficient mesh is more common with sub-d models because the deforms are more cartoony, so minimal vertices are ideal when distributing bone weighting gradients. Those models can sometimes tend to use more aggresive displacement maps to bring back sculpt details, however, at the cost of less vertices to do detailed deformations.

This was brilliant. Thank you.

Hi there, I just wanted to drop by & thank you for the treasure of knowledge I got from watching just this one video. You are a true professional & I can't thank you enough!

subscribed and bought your base mesh! I have been looking for something like this for a while.

Excalibur level delivery of concepts with real world application. Bravo brother!

I really love retopologizing, and I most definitely love how to learn better and more efficient ways to retopo. This was an awesome vid~

this could not have come at a better time, thank you J!

Very clearly explained. Thanks.

Thank you, great structure.

heya Jay this one is supa cool info as always you are one of the best of cg dudes

Thanks for the information

Amazingly useful & concise. A mini MasterClass. Thanks 🙏☕️🎩🎩🎩

Thank you so much! It work!

Thank you for this video and wish you all the best :)

This is the best 3D modeling video I have ever seen. Thank you so much for the knowledge~!

Hey J! Since you talk a lot about facial animations and blendshapes in this video, it'd be quite cool if you could talk about blendshapes in real time renderers, where there isn't many polys, like for games. Thanks for these videos, they're a gift for everyone trying to better themselves in 3D. Precise and all encompassing :D

very helpful, thank you

I can definitely see the cheeky RGB blur around the edges of the screen. I also love that effect! 🌈

Thsnks for all... so good your teach

I keep coming back to this for reference every few months. Thanks for sharing this knowledge, Jay!

Worked, thx

Totally very great video. I am diving into this and using Blender 3.4 with budget tools like Speedretopo. Reflow I will try next. But speedretopo is absolutely great to learn how to model partially manually. Why my quads turns to triangles and triangles newer ends all over the place. But J Hill just explained. First I thought I don't know something. Apparently it is normal to have challenges with manual topology. Thanks!

awesome info Thanks J

year for all of us, for so- it's still ongoing. i respect you for being honest as that's what's been keeping a bit sane recently, just being

Tip for smoothing Stars/poles in Zbrush: Hold Shift, begin smoothing w/ brush, RELEASE shift while continuing to smooth. This switches to an alternate smoothing algorythm that deals better with poles in topology.

Thanks, very good video, everyone starting out should listen to what you have to say.

One thing worth mentioning that some people forget about face - please, please have same amount of verts on both upper and lower eyelid half-loops - avoids getting eternal curse from the rigger because damn eye doesn't want to close:))

Thank you for sharing this. I´m always wondering if I'm doing topology right, this video helps a ton.🙏

thank u ！！！the best topology viedo ever seen！

I have never created anything but I now have Blender installed and starting tonight. I understood everything in this video very easily and it inspired me to get started.

Awesome video! Thanks a lot!

Good stuff! Thanks!

All excellent points in your overview thanks for sharing. I use blender for all the aspects, ive made a base mesh with proper topo by poly modeling from a round cube, then with multires workflow I can sculpt unique characters off the base mesh, those sculpts could be heavy and do retopo if need be, or they could be simpler shape-keys for a morph system, etc, etc. Im still on the learning journey with everything, so I love your vid's.

This is a awesome video, it helped me a lot!!

Thank you J!

Thanks ❤️

Ok so one question. In school I used to always think you had to combine the topology of your model. Like if you make a tea cup the handle should actually be connected to the cup, etc. But lately with ZBrush I see artists just make the handle, lever, wing, pillar, etc. and just move it into place without actually connecting the topology. Is it actually important to merge your meshes or is this just some outdated thing I learned in school?

100% about the triangle adding to ensure the quad is splitting the correct way, also important for baking that you know the triangulation is the same for the final model as the bake model to avoid artifacts later. When you import quads (non triangulated) into an engine its going to turn to triangles and some may be rotated (the dividing part of a quad) unless you export with triangulation checked or add it as a modifier to your stack / history. Fun times!

Can you make a video/tutorial on facial expression? (Tips and tricks) That would be really helpful. And quadruped topology maybe, for CG. I find it really confusing sometimes.

Man this is wat I was waiting for!! Feels like u read my mind 😅

Thank you for the video, it helps a lot.

Thank you sir fr such an synergistic video

There's too much slightly incacurate info to correct but I will say threadripper isn't desktop it's HEDT (High-End Desktop) Epyc and Xeon are workstation. Most of about PCI-E lanes is true but current GPUs can't even saturate the bandwidth of an 8x PCI-E. But NVME can.

Excellent overview!

Hi J Hill, your human topology tutorial is incredibly amazing! I want to ask, can you do a complete analysis of the Chris`s Jones Universal Human?

What a great video!

million thanks J Hill brother!

Thank you for this! Super cool video! A+++

Animation and unwraping are the main reason topology are important and polygone budget became less an issue especialy for static asset, except for mobile game and also keep a reasonable memory usage. Nice explanation of topology for human animation, i probably use some polygroup to make clean deformation zone.

i wish you also went over some quadruped topology, i know in genreral its all the same principle but maybe some examples etc or talking about problem areas like skin fold between leg/belly. anyway great video i was a bit sad when it ended :d

Hands down the best topology video for characters!!

you are the true teacher. that's really help to make my career. thankyou very much.

Thanks!

Yet another banger J!. I want to add for the poly count it's important to know your goal and at times your intended audience. The game I'm working on for example has a rough budget of about 10-20k triangles per character and it can be important of you have a portfolio to target polycounts for the projects you want to work for as well. I still have a bunch to learn as far as learning low poly and stylized workflows since I am coming into the field as a learned 2d artist , my self taught knowledge in 3d is somewhat limited so I figure that this could help someone maybe in the same position as I was in :)

Very nice and educational video as always Mr J Hill! I have a question, where can we find The Art of Moving Points (with the videos) except the Apple website? Thank you!

This was very informative

I wish I would of found this years ago! I have learned so much from watching today! I had a little bit of understanding but I frustrated trying to find a good teaching video on topology This is the Video! I watched and took notes and snippets of examples. You really have opened my understanding on this subject and can't wait to start applying what I have learned. Thanks a million for this! I am going to have to get those books!

I'm an artist who is a beginner at 3d modeling and I need to learn quickly how to do this so that I can start making a video game. I really appreciate this

Thank you.

Thank you very much!!

I now understand why model in quads. Thank you.

tons and tons of respect to you Jay