8 Tips for Clean Topology in Blender

(Updated for 2021)

by Jonathan Gonzalez in Inspiration

The process you use to put together your 3D model determines a lot - how easy
it is to edit later, how good it looks when lighting and shaders are applied, how
easy it is to deform while animating, and much more. A good model is crucial for
all of the other parts of the CG pipeline to work well. 

Messy topology, on the other hand, can make the rest of the process a disaster. 

What can you do to keep that from happening? Here are 8 tips you can use right
away.

Contents of this article:

1. Understand Common Mesh Tools
2. Know When to use N-gons, Triangles, and Quads
3. Understand Edge Flow
4. Use MatCaps "
5. When to use Creases versus Holding Edges "
6. Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)
7. Beware of Duplicates
8. Always Check Your Normals
8 Tips For Great Blender Topology

1. Understand Common Mesh Tools

This is an obvious tip, but one that everyone venturing into 3d modeling in
Blender needs to become proficient in. 

When modeling, understanding how to properly add/remove/modify the mesh s

the most important aspect. After all, 3d modeling is all about conforming
faces/edges/vertices to form a visually pleasing shape.  

So let's take a look at some of the most common types of tools you'll use when
modeling. (Note that most of these tools can only be accessed when in edit
mode in Blender .)

Adding Edge Loops

Adding edge loops is something you'd typically do to support the edges of a

mesh to create a crisp-looking edge, or just to provide additional geometry very
quickly. 

The shortcut for this is Ctrl + R. 

When this is enabled, you need to hover over the mesh itself which will then
reveal a yellow line to project where this edge loop will be placed.
To increase the number of edge loops, use your mouse scroll wheel or type in
the number of loops you want using the numeric keypad.

Inset 
Inset allows you to create things like a window. If I click a face and press I (as
in Inset) with a face selected, I can then move my mouse to create a smaller
version of that face within. This is incredibly useful for creating something like a
frame or an edge around a specific part of the mesh. Note that this creates the
face on the same surface as the face selected and does not change it's shape.

Extrude

Similar to Inset, Extrude also creates additional geometry but unlike Inset, it
allows you to change the shape of it by allowing you to take that extra geometry
and move it around. 

To extrude a face press E (as in Extrude) then move your mouse in the direction
you want to extrude to. Typically, this will default to the axis this face is pointing
in, but you may also see that you can move the extrusion in any direction you
want. Left click again in order to stop moving. 

Along with the basic extrude you also have a number of different wants to
extrude. To access more extruding options press the shortcut keys Alt + E which
will open up the extrude menu.  If you have vertex selection mode enabled you'll
see all the options available to you to extrude. 
Vertex/Edge Slide

Often times you'll need to realign vertices to conform to a proper shape and while
you can try to push and pull verts this can lead to a frustrating process of trying
to get vertices in line properly. Vertex Slide allows you to move vertices in line
with the edge(s) they are connected to. Think of it as being connected to a rail
and the rail is an edge. In order to enable this you can press G twice with a
vertex selected. If you accidentally slide a vertex, you can right click to cancel the
movement. 

The same can be done with edges to speed up the process. If you need to slide
an edge into place while keeping it along the same surface use the same
shortcut key. 
 Recommended: Mesh Modeling in
Blender
Learning modeling in Blender? This course will take you
through mesh modeling workflows and useful tools.
Included is a mini-project for practice, plus a modeling
exercise.   Watch the trailer.
Knife Tool

As the name implies, the knife tool allows you to cut into your mesh. You start by
pressing K which enables the tool to appear followed by a knife icon for the
cursor. You select an edge to add a vertex point to start off with, then connect it
to another edge. Once you're done making your cut, hit enter to save your
changes. 

By pressing C you can constrain your cut to 45-degree increments. This is useful

for getting those perfectly straight cuts in your mesh. Lastly, if you need to make
multiple cuts (that are not connected) you can press E to start a new cut. You'll
still need to save your changes by pressing enter.

Connect

Connecting vertices is a common way to easily create an edge between two

selected vertices. Select at least 2 vertices and press J to connect them. This is
similar to cutting through faces with the knife tool but much quicker. 
Fill

Similar to Connect, you can also fill in faces. Select the vertex points you want to
connect with a face, then press F. You can create an n-gon, triangle or quad with
this method and you can also use this to create an edge between two vertices. 

Subdivide and Smooth Shading

These can be found under the same Right-Click Menu but are context-specific. 

If you are in Object Mode, right clicking will reveal smooth shading, which will
smooth out the mesh and remove the faceted look. This is typically something
you'd enable after applying some subdivisions to the mesh. This is similar to
adding a subdivision surface modifier with simple enabled. Subdividing
quickly adds in more geometry and evenly distributes this new geometry
throughout your mesh. 
Right click to Subdivide in edit mode

Right click to shade smooth in object mode

These are just a handful of the most common tools. Being familiar with how
these are accessed and when to use them will improve your topology workflow. 
2. Know When to use N-gons, Triangles, and Quads
N-gons are polygons that contain 5 or more sides. For example, a pentagon is
considered an N-gon. Because of their odd shape N-gons can be difficult to
subdivide and you may see odd shading artifacts. This becomes an even bigger
issue when animating an object; if you try to bend a face in half you'll get
unexpected results. 

But N-gons are not always going to be avoided, so you might as well get familiar
with them. 

Top face of a cylinder is an N-gon

Jonathan Lampel, CG Cookie's Blender trainer, says:

N-gons are good for complex, flat shapes that won't be animated or have
subdiv. It's pretty niche, but that's where they can beat quads because
they're faster to work with. Just be careful to convert them to tris or quads
before UV unwrapping.  

Triangles aka three connected vertices are the simplest way to create a face.
Because of their simplicity, you'll find that games utilize meshes as triangles. If
you imported a model made entirely of Quads into Unity, you'll see it gets
converted into triangles. Triangles introduce poles for just about every vertex.
(Poles are 3, 5 or more edges connected to a vertex and these produce their
own problems which we'll discuss later.)
 Icosphere is made entirely of Triangles

Lastly, we have Quads. Quads have 4 edges and 4 vertices making it easy to

subdivide. This also makes them great for things like sculpting or utilizing them
within a game engine which will eventually convert these quads into triangles. 

Along with using quads, ensure that these are properly scaled. Elongated faces
will result in stretched textures and can deform your mesh topology. Quads not
only make for clean topology - they also help display the proper shape and "flow"
of your mesh.

UV Sphere is made mostly of Quads

3. Understand Edge Flow

We talked about N-gons before along with triangles and these could introduce
something known as a Pole. As I mentioned above, Poles exist when we have a
vertex with 3, 5 or more edges connected to it. 

Why is this important? Because poles essentially control the direction of your
topology. Understanding how to control the "flow" of your topology is vital to
getting specific details in place. Moving and placing poles down to control the
flow yourself is highly dependent on the model you're working on. 

If you're interested in learning more about how to control poles and edge flow, I'd
highly recommend watching this lesson on Edge Loops in Blender by Jonathan
Lampel from his Mesh Modeling Bootcamp.

In that course, Jonathan also discusses All Quad Junctions which includes this

graphic to better understand how poles could affect your topology:

Credit to Don Newman

4. Use MatCaps
MatCap (short for Material Capture) is a complete material that allows for proper
lighting and reflections. MatCaps help us see how light and reflections react to
your mesh topology. It's a very easy and quick way to determine if your mesh is
distorted due to bad topology. 

Below, we have a scene with traditional shading. While we do have some lighting
and shadows, it may be difficult to see distortions in something like a reflection.
Instead of creating a reflective material and shader in Blender we can quickly
change the viewport shading to using a MatCap.
I've applied a MatCap that includes a very glossy and reflective surface. Now I
can quickly tell if any distortion appears within the smooth curved surfaces of this
object. 

To add a MatCap you'll need to access the viewport shading menu:

Ensure you have Solid as the display method (the solid white circle) and when
you open this up you should immediately see an option to switch
between Studio, MatCap and Flat for the lighting. With MatCap selected I can
also change out the type by clicking on the preview of the material:
"

5. When to use Creases versus Holding Edges

"

There will come a time when you add a subdivision surface modifier to a mesh
with flat surface and you'll see those edges start to droop or lose their crisp
edge. 

There are a few ways you can keep the smoothness of the modifier while still
keeping those edges crisp. The first method: using a crease. 

Creases are applied directly to an edge and you can make these sharp by
increasing their crease value, sometimes also known as their weight (which is a
value between 0 and 1). Select the edge in edit mode, then use the keyboard
shortcut CTRL + E  (same as the edge menu) then move your mouse in or out
to adjust the crease weight. 

As you may have guessed, creases can only be applied to specific edges. If you
have a very smooth mesh but want specific parts of it extra sharp (such as the
body lines on a vehicle), using creases might be just the thing you need. Here's
an example of a basic cube with a subdivision modifier applied and the top 4
edges have Edge Crease enabled with a value of 1.

Holding edges are typically recommend due to the amount of influence you can
have on the mesh in general. 

Similar to a tent, the more support poles you provide, the more distinct the shape
will be. Holding edges, also known as support loops, allow you to create extra
geometry around edges to ensure they don't droop. More geometry in one area
leaves less room to "blend" between edges. The downside to this is that added
geometry can cause issues with the rest of the mesh topology. 

Take a look at a similar example, a cube with a subdivision modifier - but this
time, we have holding edges supporting each corner:

Here is another example of both, but with the cube on the left containing nothing
but creases. This means less geometry which may be useful if you're really tight
on how much geometry you can include in a scene or object but has it's
downsides as you can see:

6. Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)

This is largely dependent on your mesh, but often you can break it up to ensure
that detailed pieces don't make the rest of your mesh denser than it needs to be.
Think about a car door handle. The car door itself can be relatively simple
geometry-wise, but a door handle has a key hole, handle and frame around that
handle. 

The handle will be more intricate. But why should the entire door provide
supporting loops and geometry for a smaller piece? It makes sense to create the
car door and the handle separately. You can get as detailed as you want with the
door handle, while the door keeps it's low polygon count. 

Along with that, determine the bare minimum of edge loops needed to form the
shape you're looking for. It may be tempting to add in a ton of loops early on to
make something look better, but the more geometry you add, the harder it
becomes to work with. Limit your loops early on to create what is needed, then
add more where necessary.

7. Beware of Duplicates
When you start using tools like Inset and Extrude you may forget to move the
added geometry which leaves duplicates in the exact same place. Depending on
what was duplicated it may be difficult to really see the changes made, but will
become apparent when you try to manipulate the mesh in those areas. Take a
look at the image below: can you spot the duplicate vertices?

Here,  I extruded the top face by pressing E but then hit enter. Sometimes you
may accidentally hit enter or think you cancelled the operation when all you really
did was leave it in place. I can select the top face and move it up:
If you suspect you may have duplicate vertices, you can select the entire mesh
and use shortcut key Alt + M to pull up the Merge menu. You'll be provided
options to merge vertices (assuming you have more than one selected) based off
the center point, 3d cursor, or to collapse them into one. The last option is By
Distance which was previously known as "doubles". If vertices are close enough,
they will be merged together.  

8. Always Check Your Normals

Similar to duplicate geometry, you may notice that your mesh appears darker
than normal. 

First off - what is a normal? 

Normals refer to the direction of the faces. Here you can see blue lines
indicating the direction each face is pointing in:
If you want to enable this yourself you can find this setting under overlays at the
bottom where it says Normals. You can select Vertex, Split or Face normals
along with a size for the length of the blue line:
From time to time you may be working on a mesh and end up in a situation
where your normals are flipped in the opposite direction. While this mostly affects
the rendering of your object, it may confuse you into trying to fix the issue by
adding more edge loops or modifying the mesh. 
Below is an example of a couple faces of our mesh flipped. The faces still exist
but because they're pointing in the opposite direction they result in weird
shading. In rare instances you may also have issues creating edge loops through
these areas. By enabling the normals display you can see which faces have
issues.

In general, flipping normals is done all at once. To open up the normals menu
use shortcut Alt+N. Next, you can recalculate outside to have the normals
pointing outward. 

In rare cases, you may be building a model where the inside is rendered in which
case you'd want to recalculate the inside. This is also important when working
with games. You may export a model and notice that mesh looks transparent and
only the inner portions are rendered:

This is due to the normals being flipped. Typically you only render one side of a
mesh as there's no point in rendering parts of a mesh you won't actually see
(which also helps with performance). If you experience this when importing into a
game engine you'd have to recalculate the normals to the outside in Blender and
reimport that once again. Make sure to check out my article on Maximizing
Your Unity Game Performance as well.

Retopology Tools
Once you get to a point where you are working with higher density mesh models
on a regular basis you will want to speed up your retopology workflow. 

Retopology is the process of turning dense topology into simpler, lower poly
topology. This is especially useful when working with game assets or animations,
where sculpted objects will be too costly to utilize or provide improper
deformations.

RetopoFlow

RetopoFlow is retopology suite created in house by Jonathan Williamson and

Jonathan Denning and can be found on the Blender Market. You can watch a
free course on how to use RetopoFlow addon - prepare to have your mind
blown! 

DynRemesh/AutoFlow

DynRemesh 2.5 is a quad-based remesher for Blender 2.8, assisting in

retopology for your dyntopo sculpts & 3dscans containing too many triangles. 

Tesselator
Tesselator is a remeshing addon that helps you create regular quad and triangle
meshes easily out of sculpts. 

Where to go Next