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I'm an absolute beginner who attended a small blender course as part of my study. For our evaluation, we were supposed to recreate a real-life object in blender. With the help of a step-by-step tutorial I made a DMG-01 Gameboy (very original, I know). THIS is what my final result looks like. HERE are a couple more pictures and a small lighting animation that I made as well.

After taking a closer look, the professor remarked that my mesh topology looks "absolutely horrendous" and I now have until Friday to fix at least the mesh of the case itself (minus the buttons, etc). This is what it currently looks like: LINK + PasteAll - The bad topology seems to be a result of me using a lot of boolean cutters and bevels.

I admit that I completely ignored my mesh topology while working on my model because the tutorial that I was following wasn't fixing anything either...

So I know that to eliminate N-Gons, I can easily triangulate faces and then turn those tris to quads with a few clicks. The result doesn't look promising, though:

"fixed" mesh topology"

What are the next steps here? How would you go about fixing this topology? I would be glad if someone could point me in the right direction with a few tips. I'm sure this isn't too complicated and won't take much time to fix. I just don't know where to start as I still very much an absolute beginner.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the help, everyone!

Today I tried a bunch of things to clean up my topology (Decimate Modifer, Shrinkwrap Modifier, manual fixing, etc) but none of the methods yielded satisfying results, at least not with my lack of experience. I talked to a friend of mine and he let me use his HardOps Addon, or more specifically, its “Dice” tool.

This is my final result after using the tool and doing some manual cleanup afterwards:

enter image description here

enter image description here

There are still some N-Gons around the beveled parts that I will probably just triangulate. I hope this will make my professor happy, that’s the most important thing! ;-)

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  • $\begingroup$ This tutorial starts with modeling a Gameboy and will introduce you to an unusual but effective workflow for such modeling. $\endgroup$
    – Marty Fouts
    Commented Jun 1, 2022 at 15:49
  • $\begingroup$ Meshes that are the result of multiple booleans usually require a "full rework" and therefore there is no quick fix most of the time. A good place to start, however, would be to use a Decimate Modifier set to Planar (you will need to be in wireframe mode to "preview" its results before applying it) - it won't solve everything, but it should help clean up some of those webs. This also will likely still leave some n-gons that you will have to deal with afterwards, or you may encounter shading artifacts. $\endgroup$
    – Christopher Bennett
    Commented Jun 1, 2022 at 19:07

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Maybe you should redo it from scratch. Also you don't need such a dense topology, just give your object a SUbdivision Surface modifier, and the end you'll apply it if necessary (always keep a version with unapplied modifiers though).

First prepare a flat version of your object (here a simplified version):

enter image description here

Extrude up:

enter image description here

Dig the slots with Extrude Along Normals:

enter image description here

Bevel, etc:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the thorough explanation! If I had the time, I would definitely do it from scratch. But sadly, I don't think I would be able to make it in time. $\endgroup$
    – TomBoss
    Commented Jun 1, 2022 at 16:14

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