Clean Topology By Neil Blevins Created On: Nov 17th 2025 Updated On: Nov 22nd 2025 Software: Any
So what is "Clean Topology"? When modeling in 3d software, there are
many modeling methods available to you. But no matter what method you
choose, your goal is to not just create a good looking final model, but
a "clean" mesh. In this case, "clean" means primarily 2 things...
A mesh that is easily updatable and modifiable, and
A mesh that is optimized to work as efficiently as possible in
whatever renderer you will be using.
This article discusses a few general best practices to achieve clean
topology when modeling.
6 Tips to Achieve Clean Topology
Lets start with my 6 favorite tips to achieve clean topology, then we
will show some examples of why and when to follow these tips.
The 6 tips are:
Try and keep your mesh All Quad
Faces (tris are second best)
All quads should be as Square
as possible.
All the quads in a mesh should be a Similar Size.
Have the Edge Loops Follow The
Flow of the mesh
Avoid High Valence Vertexes
(vertexes with more than 4 edges).
Use as Few Faces As Possible
to achieve the shape.
Keep in mind, these tips are not set in stone. In some cases, it's fine
to violate some of these tips. And in some cases, one tip might negate
the other. For example, to have as few faces as possible, you may not
be able to have all square quads. Deciding which rules to break and
when is a
matter of opinion and experience, but I'll try and explore some of
these questions in the examples below.
An Example
Let's look at an example, say I have the following mesh, a rectangle
that's got beveled edges.
Looks fine when rendered...
But take a look at the faces that make up the mesh:
Kind of crazy, huh? These sorts of rats nest meshes happen a lot, like
for example, when importing a mesh from CAD software, or the result of
a Boolean operation.
So first question, if the mesh looks fine when rendered, why does it
matter that this mesh has all sorts of long edges and chaotic geometry?
Well, the mesh may in fact be fine as is in some situations. But if you
need to modify it,
you're in for a world of hurt.
Say that this mesh is a part of a deformable character. Let's do a
simple deformation, something you might expect on a human model, let's
bend the mesh along the X axis. See the results below, well that didn't
work out very well.
Now what if the director asks you to add more detail to the center of
the mesh? No problem, I'll use an edge loop to split the mesh directly
in half. Oh but wait, my edge loop tool doesn't work very well anymore?
Why isn't the loop straight across? (see red edgeloop line).
Now what if I want to perform other actions on my mesh, like for
example sculpt the mesh or add a displacement map. Wow, that looks
awful...
As you can see, editing or deforming this mesh just doesn't work due to
its topology. Now lets go about creating a cleaner topology by
carefully editing the mesh to follow some of my 6 tips.
Notice the differences.
All faces are quads
While not perfect squares, the quads are much more square
While not identical sizes, the quads tend to be pretty close in
size
you now have dozens of edgeloops that properly follow the
direction of the mesh, rather than a bunch of edges that are at an
angle.
The high valance vertexes are now gone
And as you might expect, the results are way easier to deal with.
Bending the mesh works fine.
Before
After
Adding a new edge loop works as expected.
Before
After
Sculpting works far more as expected as well...
Before
After
The cleaner mesh only has 2 downsides...
It took longer to create, I created all that extra geometry by
hand.
It has way more faces. The first mesh had 34 faces. The second
better topology mesh has 2500 faces, so almost 100 times more. Why is
that an issue? Because more faces will slow down a renderer and take
up more memory.
As far as the time it took to create the cleaner topology, there are a
few methods for automatically improving the mesh that take less user
time, for example
Re-Topologizing tools
Quadrilateral Tesselation
Creating very simple base meshes to then add detail using
subdivision surfaces.
These techniques take up less work than the manual way of adding edges
and faces by hand. But many times doing the clean up by hand produces
the best results, and gives you the most control.
As far as reducing the number of faces, this can be very renderer
dependent. For example, if your final renderer is an offline renderer
for a feature length animated film, having extra faces may not
be that big a deal. But if your output is a game engine, where you want
60-120 frames rendered per second, then adding all those extra faces
could be real trouble, especially if the mesh appears many times in the
scene. In
which case, you will need to find the right balance between optimizing
the mesh (having as few faces as possible) and having a nice clean mesh.
A mesh like this might be a better compromise, it won't work well if
sculpted, but will work fine for bending around the x direction and
adding extra edge loops. And is 280 faces instead of 2500.
Questions To Ask Yourself
So when creating a new mesh or deciding the clean up an existing mesh,
here are some of the more important questions to ask yourself...
What's the final output? A game or a film? Will it matter if my
meshes have a lot of faces?
Will my mesh deform, be sculpted or displaced? If your mesh is a
character or the branch of a tree, it may be worth being extra careful
on making a clean mesh. A building in a city? Maybe less so.
How likely will you need to modify your mesh later on? If
frequently, then a cleaner mesh might be your best bet so it's easier
to change.
Will your mesh be used with a simulation system like cloth, hair,
water, fire? Some of these systems require special types of topology,
for example, cloth sims work off tris and don't work as well if your
geometry is quads.
How much time do you have to clean up the mesh to give it good
topology? Some concept artists give up good topology in order to have
faster iterations. But once they hand off their final mesh to the 3d
team, will the team waste way too much time cleaning up the mess you've
created?
Conclusion
So once again, keep in mind that my 6 tips are not law, there are times
you'll want to violate the rules for a good reason depending on whether
you're working in film or games, whether you're working on a character
that will likely deform or a hard surface model that won't, or how much
time you have to create a clean mesh. But in general, I'd recommend
everyone to keep their meshes as clean as possible.
Will post some tips on the various methods to clean up your geometry in
a future tutorial, but remember the best way to have a clean mesh is to
start by modeling clean from the get go. It may add a little extra
time, but if it adds 10% modeling time, but you avoid 100 times the
headache later on, it's likely worth it.
