Learn RetopoFlow3 - Ultimate Retopo Tutorial

hey guys henry morton from flip normals here and in today's video we are going to take a look at how you can use re topoflow for blender and also some really cool re-topo concepts which can really improve your work so let's jump into blender and take a look at the most anticipated add-on of the year with retroflow installed we simply have to click on the object we want to read topologized and then we go to retop flow and then we click create new target this is going to make this model a target and it's going to allow us to re-to apologize on top of that when we click it we're going to see this menu popping up and it's going to go into re-top of flow mode this is a mode which has all the tools readily available and it's easy to use it really removes all the clutter from blender as a little heads up before you are starting to re-topologize you need to make sure that your model is decimated currently this model is around 75 000 points but if if you're bringing something like a 2 million poly model it's going to break nothing is going to work so if if it's really slow for you first check that your model is really low poly first so now we are in re-topo flow mode now just before we get too deep into that this video is going to be comprised of two parts the first part is going to be us going through the different tools we are using actually how to use re-topoflow and this second part is going to cover how you can actually apologize with some proper theory and concepts we're not going to do this whole head but we'll get as far as as we really need to in order to explain the concepts so you can also find the time stamps as well where we're covering the different topics so the first tool we are looking at is contours contours is a really useful tool for read to pose i think we're topologizing things like arms and hands in this case the neck every tool in retroflow will be using the control key and the left mouse button just a regular click to create geometry if you want to create geometry for the contours simply just hold down the control key and just drag and now you can see that we have created a line all the way around this if we want to increase or decrease the spans we can hit the plus and the minus key on the keyboard or we can use the shift key and just drag up and down like so then in order to create more spans we can hold down the control key and just drag more and now you can see that we have created a nice geometry going across like so this is a not necessarily the best use case for this tool it is useful for the neck but this is far more useful for things like fingers and hands and other limbs like that any cylindrical piece of geometry it's made for that basically it's really useful then also a little tip as well for read overflow you can find tool settings for every single tool and documentation if you hit the f1 key this is going to bring up the general help and if you hit the f2 key it's going to give you it's going to give you tool tips for the specific tool you are using so i really recommend looking through the general help section as well figuring out just what what's being covered and how you can use the tools better so contours really a really useful tool for creating geometry like this the general selection in in blender still applies to read topoflow as well so if you want to deselect something you can see the selection is in green you simply hit alt and a if you want to select everything you hit the a key then we have poly strips polar strips is a really useful tool for blocking out your general loops this is what you might you might want to use just for an area like maybe the forehead if again we hold on a control key and then we drag out we can just draw now you see that we are creating a line and now you can see that we have created a strip of polys which we can now manipulate we have two handles on either side which we can now start to move around and we can move this up and down and then we can also change the angle of it as well which really allows you a lot of creativity and a lot of freedom when you're doing your initial blockouts you can also hit the plus and the minus key as well to create to change the spans as well and you can see the the span here is being shown you have six you have six polygons here and if you go down to the bottom you can see how your overall scene pull account this does not include the target mesh this is only what's currently in your scene as a little tip as well while we're at it if you look all the way to the bottom you can see we have some general tool tips for the specific tool selected so you can see the hotkeys for the polystrips tool you can see something like increased segments and decrease segments so if you want to create a new one you can hit alt a we're just going to deselect it and then we can simply draw out another one like so and you can just move this around you'll also see that your the strip width is determined by your brush size which you can get access to by hitting the f key so if we hit the f key now you can see that this goes up and down so if you want to make this even smaller and we hold down the ctrl key and drag you can now see that we get significantly smaller polygons meaning that you're going to get more polys in this area which again you can change for the plus and the minus key so really useful tool then we're just going to delete everything because our scene is getting a bit messy and we can do this by hit selecting everything here hitting the a key if you hit the x key you now get the delete and the solve menu in this case we're going to go to delete and just hit delete vertices then we're going to look into the strokes tool this is one of my favorite tools of read topoflow and allows you to really create really quickly create awesome geometry i find this to be a bit better than polystrips because i have more control this way i have more precision where this is useful is if you want to for instance create a loop going down his nasolabial fold so if you hold on a control key like what everything control creates geometry you can now just drag this down like so and you can now see you have eight polygons in this strip which can increase or decrease with a plus and a minus key like before and then with this selected you can see it's selected because it's green you can hold the ctrl key and you can draw another strip like so and go down here now you can see it's going to be bridged like this i prefer this because it gives me a lot more precision than polystrips i really control each individual part of it because i'm using my cursor while the polar strips is more you control the ends of it the nice thing is here you can sort of define the size and the thickness of your polygons as well notice how sort of on the cheeks there there's more fat so maybe the polygons are a little further apart for example it just gives you a lot more control this way we can also increase and decrease the spans between it by the plus and minus key this is why i prefer to keep this set to the lowest i don't really want any spans between this that's a personal preference i prefer to work in a way more low poly but more on that later in the theory part what you can also do is you if you just click somewhere else you're going to deselect a deselect what was selected or you can again alt a what you can do is you can select one of these loops one of these edges hold down the control key and then we can start to drag it out and i can see that we can just quickly drag out a loop like this if you want to drag out more from these ones you want to drag all this down hold down control key and just drag it down like so which is really useful it means you can create a lot of polys very quickly as a little heads up it doesn't work crazy well if you do a lot of crazy curves like this just because the um the edges aren't perpendicular to the point they stay at the same orientation as the current one but it works really well if you're creating things which which doesn't have too much of a curve in them again plus and minus to increase and decrease the amount of segments then we have patches patches is currently in being improved and there are i do have some issues with it so i don't tend to use this a whole lot but the theory of it which works pretty well right now is that you can select one edge here you can double click an edge like this and this creates polygons for all of these edges you can do this as well and you see all the highlights here where you see two times seven and you know how many polygons you're going to be creating now so really useful in cases like exactly this one here where you just select this you can also use this to bridge polys as well where you select one you select the other and you hit the f key to bridge it f or enter will commit to it it doesn't work in all cases so i when it works it's amazing but there are some cases where it's not fantastic like in case of this where currently it it will overlap it like so which means this is not a great scenario for it then we have the poly pen tool the poly pen tool is amazing and is one of the tools i'm using the most the tools i'm using really the most so far will be the poly pen and the strokes tool this is a fantastic tool for general returpo you're spending a lot of time tweaking and just adding loops here or adding topology here and there instead of just adding the big loops the poly pen tool works by hitting the control key then you can create a point if you click another one then you create a line if you draw again you get a triangle and you have to right click again you get a quad which is really useful because now you can just click this edge and if an edge is selected it will draw a triangle if a triangle is selected it will draw a quad where you can change this is if you click control and i'm not sure what this icon is called on the keyboard but it's the one right above the tab icon so if you hit control and that one i think that's the tilde key then that's a tilde key i think so then it might might be then we have the settings for it which is tri-quad or quad only so if we set this to quad only which is how i prefer to work we can just change this here it's just imagine if you're doing you're putting down 2 000 polys by hand now you just have to click once to create a quad instead of clearing clicking twice to create first a triangle then a quad it's just really useful for my workflow which i just love if you don't find this key on your keyboard which you might not if you have something like a norwegian keyboard or something like not international one you can still go to the settings in the options to the top right you will see the poly pen and you can set this to quad only edges only try only your tripod as well and while we are on the topic of the potentially named tilde key we have another menu as well which is under the same key if you just click the tilde key you can now see we have a general radial menu this is how i prefer to work i don't really use any of the interface items because it's just i have to click here click here and go between them so i prefer to just go between the for instance the polystrips tool then the poly pen tool contours it's just a lot quicker than having to go over here as well in the documentation you can also find the various hotkeys for the tools as well even if you hover over it now you can see for instance it's one or it's ctrl alt c so you can freeze use one two three four five but even that i just prefer to use the menu i just find it to be more intuitive but that's up to you so back to the poly pen tool if we select an edge and just hold down the control key we are now creating new geometry like this if we select this edge and we hold on the control key and it will now bridge it with this it will merge it with this edge which is why this is so powerful so it means that you can very quickly create a lot of good topology in certain areas for instance if you want to create a loop going from here to here you hit the control key draw out a single line hold it down ctrl key again and now we can just start to block in this entire line like so if you want to keep adding to this you can drag it up like so and we can just keep on working if you for instance are in a case where you want to bridge these two you can just hold on ctrl key and just bridge these two like so so it's one of these tools where it's great for manual work if you want to quickly block something in polystrips or strokes is fantastic but for general work the poly pen tool is what you're going to be using the most also if you click a point then you can also just move this point individually as well you have a lot of control with this approach you can do the same if you select a polygon you can click on that move it around same edge as well then we have the loops tool the loops tool allows you to if you hold down the control key insert loops and this will conform to the surface if you see here if you undo real quick if you see here now it's straight and then hold on control key with loops tool it will now conform to it if you just left a nice button on it just drag it normally it will just conform to what we have like so as well if you double click this will select a loop so for instance you want to remove this loop you just simply double click it then you hit the x key and then you go to dissolve and you go to dissolve edges and that's going to remove this loop then we have the tweak tool this is really useful as well this is a tool you can use to really tweak what you have the poles you already have it's not used for adding new things as you just use for like the name implies tweaking which means that we can now just go in and we can just click on the verts currently this only supports verts so you can't use this to select a polygon or an edge only verts for now if you hit the f key you can now change the brush size of it which allows you to move it up and down and if we hit ctrl f we can change the falloff like so which also changes very visually in a very strong way and if we hit shift f now we can change the intensity of it so i prefer to work with as high intensity as possible just because this this allows me to really tweak something like this so now you have a really strong tweak tool which you can use to move stuff around then we have the relax tool which does also what is implied if you just hold down the the left mouse button it will just relax whatever you have this is one of these essential tools you just need when doing returpo because you're not going to get it right the first time as a little note as well if you for instance are in the poly pen tool and you want to move this around you can of course just move around like this just by left mouse button dragging on it or you can use the g g key just a regular move tool in blender you can use the s key to scale it up and you can use the r key to rotate around like so this of course works with multiple selections as well if you just hold down the shift key and you select multiple polys you can do the same thing oh nice the nice thing is that everything is sort of snapped to the mesh by default so all changes that you do will automatically conform to your underlying mesh then we have a last tool we have to look at as well out of these that is the symmetry tool if we go to in the top right options symmetry and we set this to x now we're going to get symmetry across the x-axis this can be a little bit annoying sometimes particularly if you get a bit close to this area and you can for instance now see if you want to add topology here you have a line in the middle and you might be obs you might be confused by what's going on here in that case i simply just turn it off and then i just turn around again this is not a live modifier in the sense that if you go out of return flow then it will be a modifier this will be baked into your model so if you exit returperflow then you will then you will have this model as it is right now so retail flow is an incredible tool and it allows you to create topology really quickly now with the tools we have discussed we will now start to do some quick re-topo theory we will quickly just select everything and then we'll delete it then we'll just select just the x key and just hit delete vertices and we'll start off by blocking in some main loops so some of my my philosophy when it comes to re-topologizing is get the main loops right first and then you start to block it in you don't start to go here and you just perfect the eye it's going to be impossible to connect something up yeah one thing you don't want to get lost in when you're doing re-topology is details it's very easy to get distracted by especially if you have a detailed model like wrinkles and tiny little things imperfections in the skin but what you're after are the overall shapes on the face so we'll be starting with this with the strokes tool enabled you can also just hit maybe to tell the key and then we can go to strokes and this is a phenomenal tool i'm going to disable symmetry for now this is it's a little bit easier to see what's going on and then i'll start to just draw out by holding down the control key just draw out a circle around the eye like so and then you're going to be see you'll be seeing that we have now 16 segments i'm just going to decrease that to something like 12. and then we're going to draw a second circle around the eyes like so and now you can see we have created a topology as a general tip i prefer to to tweak this right away i really like to draw something out make sure it's nice and then draw more things out so for instance in this case i would like these lines to be these polygons to be a bit more even so we can go in and tweak tool use your hotkey tweak tool hit the f key move it down a little bit and then we're just gonna spend a little bit of time tweaking this and keep in mind that different parts of the face typically require different resolutions so something like the nose might use bigger faces compared to close to the eyes for example you want more detail in there even in the topology so keep it really light right away don't go too much above this we just want to block in the loops and again the strokes tool is fantastic for this so we before what we have to do now is we really have to remember to hit alt a or deselect everything because otherwise it's going to try to do this it's going to try to actually connect things up from this which it can't so alt a and then we can draw out the second loop and we're going to be drawing this for around here and it doesn't have to be perfect we can always tweak this later on so now we have one line then we just want to draw this out as well like so and now you can see we have another loop hit the minus key because i don't want any more more spans in the middle because this is another theory point as well when it comes to retuppo keep it as light as possible for as long as possible it's going to be so much easier to connect things up one of my philosophies as well is slow is fast it might look like if you're just blocking things out using something like polystrips and contours that that is a really fast way of working and it's a really fast way of blocking out geometry but it might not be a good way of actually making the final result because you so much of the work with retopoly is connecting the different loops up and doing it this slowly and methodically really speeds that process up you run into the issue that you often do with automatic re-topo solutions as well where what you initially create looks good but once you actually start connecting things up and editing it it doesn't actually work that well yeah it's just a problem you just want to work slowly and methodically so in this case i actually have too many loops here i think so i want to just undo this real quick and then we can draw out another one and then it's important that you draw you change the loops in the in the first stroke so i'm like eight might be a bit better the reason i thought it was a bit too much is because you want it to be light you'd really want to go lighter and add more things instead of going too heavy and there isn't a you know a spreadsheet that outlines every part of the face or body whatever it is that needs to be retopologized how many spans are needed it's just experience you figure out how few can you usually get away with then i'm going to draw a line out around here again hit alt a to deselect everything and we're just going to draw a line like so and then we are just going to remove a few maybe two and then we're going to draw another line like so and then it connects it up and hit the minus key and what i'm kind of thinking about now when i'm doing this is does this connect up with this it doesn't have to be perfect right away but it's a really good idea to just keep it in mind i'm just mentally connecting these up now and then i'll just remove it if it doesn't fit because then this this way you can bridge it really easily for instance this one here is it's just one too many so we can hit selected with the loops tool select delete it and then we just do dissolve edges there we go you can see there's a little flinch there as well nothing actually changed with our model it's it's just a display that changed well one thing changed it deleted an edge but that was the intended effect so i just want to block these things out and then i'm going to delete this one and delete this one so delete this and delete this do select with loops tool hit the x key and then we will set to dissolve edges and now you can see these are going to match up perfectly fine and then we'll do another one around the mouth but for the mouth i want to enable symmetry this is a good time to enable symmetry so then we will again use strokes and we'll just draw this out like so and then we'll draw another one and this was a bit too heavy actually was 10 so i want to just have this bit lighter so just maybe eight and then we hold down the control key and we just drag this out like so now you can see we have nice loops hit the minus key and now we have some nice topology now we're going to use the tweak tool to just move this up like so and you can see the center line moves right in the actual center you can't move this left right you can only move it up and down this is also why it's so nice to keep it really low poly because it's so much easier to move these points around it only takes a few seconds to move this into place and the quicker or the better your foundation is the easier it is going to be to add everything later on i'm also trying to keep some of the topology just chew some of the facial features here such as maybe you see this line going down here which is a bit like the fat around the mouth and just trying to to match it just a little bit it doesn't have to be perfect but the more you can do that the easier it's going to be so this is my general approach for retopology we will start now to use the poly pen tool you can see how quickly we were able to block this out using exclusively the strokes tool you can even be faster than this if you were if you're really trying to i'm just trying to be a bit slow now for the purpose of the tutorial so i'll select an edge and then i'll hold down the ctrl key and then we'll just block this out like so and again i'm trying to mentally match these things up it doesn't have to be perfect we can always adjust it but you want to be in a spot where you're not like twice off you don't want to have 40 going into 20. then we can take this guy and we can drag it out like so and drag it out like so and then i want to just get one loop going down in the middle here you could of course just create this loop without this one but you know it doesn't really hurt and i'm trying to match this up to this the nice thing about doing that is you kind of get it for free in a sense if you want to bridge this in later on it's just so much easier to just bridge it like so or we can use the patches tool for this sometimes i do this slower route because even if even if it's technically a bit slower because i don't have to switch the tools because switching tools can just break my flow a little bit but in this case we can just draw these down like so and then we can just add some more polygons like so and then we have to use the tweak tool or you can use our little menu go to tweak and then we can just move it into the center it's pretty important to get this into the center right away and to just make sure that the loops are nice and and clean i'm just trying to stick a little bit with the um the facial features like so and then i'll connect this up to here use the pulley pen tool then we'll click on here and then i'll add one loop in the middle and then we just start to connect it up this is why it's so important to block it out in a clean manner in early on because it's it's just so much quicker to to connect things up than it is to fix it so we're just gonna use the tweak tool a little bit and i tend to not really use the relax tool until i have more resolution than this there are some areas we could relax but it generally works better if you have a lot more resolution you can also see how forgiving it is and easy it is to make fewer mistakes when you do work with a lower res mesh doing it in a methodical way like this just allows you to have much more control and takes away a lot of the second guessing of how many spans do i need to connect this up if you create that mental image while you're re-topologizing you're you're sort of taking away a lot of the stress and extra work you would normally have to do from yourself yeah i'm never really thinking about oh i need six loops for this and 12 loops for this and just mathematically working it up but just but like you were saying just keeping it low just makes it so much easier yeah and just just look you know look what sort of matches up we're also going to be using the strokes tool for this area as well this is like the perfect example of the strokes tool i'm just going to give it a little more space around here so i'm just going to move this down a little bit so it's not going to interfere with that and then we'll use the strokes tool to drag something out here again hit alt a before using strokes tool you never know nastiness can come from that then we just draw it out like so and that's 14 i'm just going to decrease it a little bit you see my approach is i tend to decrease instead of increasing it it's a lot easier to add things later on than it is to decrease it and then we go over it like so and now you can see we have a beautiful little line around it now if we want to move this a bit closer what we can do is we can use the loops tool and then we can hit the sq at the s and the s key and then we can just scale in just a little bit like so so we just scale down everything and this just fits a little bit better then we can use the tweak tool to just make this fit even better so overall returfo is is a fantastic readable tool i'm very impressed with it so far lot of people are asking how does it compare to to maya's quadro and it's pretty pretty solid like it's it's it's basically it's basically there and i'm just trying to match up some of these so some of these lines so we can we can bridge them and this is where we topper gets fast we get fast results quite quickly when you you've already laid down a proper foundation and then you can start to bridge these things up yeah it's one that one easy trick where you do methodical work for a long time before and then it's easy yeah but you can see how fast it actually is to actually start to block this in we're not that far in we're like 10 minutes into this and you see some of the major parts of the face have already been blocked in but yeah that's what i mean slow is fast when it comes to this it means you're spending some a lot of time making this right and then you can just block in it really quickly now we can reduce the patches tool and we can just click on it like so and then we can hit the f key to commit and now we can just copy crazy i prefer to still do this in smaller chunks just because it means i control what's happening a bit better and once you start breaking it down into i guess the simpler elements especially for face because that can be one of the more complex things to read to apologize it does actually become pretty simple yeah it really helps me if i have some reference to look for like simply just googling like topology just having something to look at because it can be a bit tricky in the beginning too to figure out what's going on once you lay down that groundwork the foundation the small pillars around the cornerstones then things tend to fall into place a lot easier it's a very nice feeling i want to have another loop in here as well and then we can just use the loops tool hold on ctrl key and again ctrl key because everything is based around the control key then we can use the the pen tool and just add this in here and then we can just add this in here and then we can start to connect some of these up as well i won't do the whole face just because that should be its own separate series which it might be but uh this just shows you the overall concepts how you can work from slow to fast one really cool thing about this approach is that when you start this low and you make it clean from the beginning all you really have to do in order to add more topology is that you just subdivide your mesh once and then you might tweak it a little bit afterwards but that's a great help in adding more resolution yeah that's like a that is actually like a one-way trick where you you can you can just keep it this low and then just subdivide it and bake it in and looks great so this is where we could keep on going forever with this but i think we made a lot of our points with how we want to approach retopology in blender in short we block in the important loops first you can look for reference in order to figure out what the where those loops are and use simple tools for this you don't have to go crazy with with something like poly strips or contours just use simple tools use the poly pen tool use the strokes tool and just really quickly or really methodically block in the main loops once you've blocked in the main loops then we can use the poly pen to connect things up we can use patches to connect it up and it's just it's just it's just really fast if you want to work that way as a last thing though it's a good idea afterwards to go over with the relaxed tool and just soften everything out so satisfying so satisfying i found the relaxed tool in returboflow to be really excellent so even with low polys or high polish it just produces a really solid result so definitely go over that and and just make your model just a lot smoother as well so yeah that's how you use read topoflow in blender it's a fantastic little add-on for for blender which makes retopology a real joy to use so if you want to see more read top of video took flow or just re-topo in blender in general just let us know down in the comments if you have any tips on using retroflow or any general tips on re-taco please let us know as well we'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the subject thank you guys so much for watching

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 88,343

Rating: 4.9510112 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: X8kQiccJetw

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020