Diary Entry 17/05/25

 For today I decided to put my attention on my 3D modelling skills when it came down to circular topology on whilst maintaining quads across the board. This was because I was struggling when I modelled the laptop with the USB ports. The topology was messed up, had pinching and I struggled to reroute topology to maintain edge flow. 

I chose to start modelling something simple, but also contained exactly what I was looking for. I chose a skeleton knife from the game 'Counter Strike.' This knife contained 6 different holes of all sizes while on a flat simple base. I gathered a few images for this to reference since this was only a simple model.

Since I am focusing on topology, many of the images featured here will be mostly wireframed.

I began this mesh by adding in cylinders for the circle placements and extruded the edges to begin developing the loops needed to fit inside the quad topology. Here you can see what I was going for by aligning all the circles as straight as possible after extruding and bridging the circles together to form a base for the outer section of the handle for this weapon.

Bridging the extruded circles to form the handle base

From here, I began searching for a clear path at creating 5 point stars. I wanted to create 4 points for each circle to maintain clean topology. The bottom circle was an exception by only having 2 stars at the top since the edge flow was already wrapping around nicely at the bottom of the handle.

Whilst shaping the sides as well as the topology, I was figuring out how to avoid tri's too. After a lot of topology rerouting, deleting faces and some trial and error, I was able to get exactly what I wanted to achieve for the shape and topology flow.

Left side before retopology. Right finished handle with clean edge flow and rerouted topology.

The left corner for the large circle was the biggest problem as you may be able to see from the image. This was because I did not want to move the 5 point star. I wanted it to be symmetrical to the placement of the rest of the circles. However, I was able to overcome this and produce the topology on the right. 

Overall, I do need to improve my speed on puzzle solving when it comes to these issues, but I am glad I was able to do this with no tutorials or help at all. Took roughly just under 2 hours to make this shape. Disappointing to go from making a whole car model last year to just about this in under 2 hours, but I am out of practice and aim to grind back to my original skill level.