Must Have Addons & Tools for Retopology

hello and welcome to gabit media i'm grant abbott and in this video we're taking a quick look at the different options for read topology within blender i'll be giving the advantages and disadvantages of each approach but it's not a tutorial about how to use each of these options instead it's an overview of which tools to use and when and the differences between paid add-ons free add-ons and just options available in the normal blender settings if you want to see a specific video about how to use the tools then let me know in the comments below and i'll see what i can do this is part of a series i'm doing on read topology playlist link is in the description the first video looks at what is retopology and why do we bother this video is split up into chapters and you can find those in the description along with the links summer affiliate links so you'll be supporting me if you click on those at the end i'll quickly summarize by talking about the tools that i use firstly we're going to look at the tools within blender that aren't add-ons they just come with blender the first tool we'll look at is the decimate tool so here's an example of a sculpt that's really high resolution and you can see it's one half million faces or three million triangles and if i zoom in you can see the resolution detail i right click and shade smooth and you can get a further idea so obviously this sculpt needs to be retopologized in order to be optimal and render quickly be used in games and so forth one of the easiest and most useful tools to use within blender is the decimate modifier you come across the modifiers add modifier and decimate is under the generate just here and if i click on that you've got a ratio here that's probably the most important thing and a face count here so it's telling us the current face count and i can change the ratio let's say to 0.1 and press enter that will pause for a moment whilst it works it out and that took about 20 seconds and you can see it's reduced it down to about 300 000 faces now because this is a modifier we actually need to apply it to actually create that geometry on our mesh and most of the time that's what you'll want to do so i'll press ctrl a to apply it and again that will take a few seconds because of the high resolution and there we have it so we can now see we've got our faces here and it's much closer now between triangles and the actual quads that's because it triangulates the mesh and makes quite a mess like this so the topology is really bad from the decimate modifier what it does really well if i go back to object mode is it keeps the structure you can hardly tell that it's got a decimate modifier on it and it's been reduced that's what makes this modifier really really useful if i go into the decimate modifier again and it should be a bit quicker this time so i'll bring it down to point one once again and press enter that was far quicker because it had less faces to deal with and you can see it's still just about keeping the structure there's a few places that look a little bit strange but it's brought it down to 30 000 faces let's apply that and that was quick again let's look at the structure and you can see it adds detail where it needs to these faces are quite wide and big compared to these fine faces in here around the nostril where it's trying to keep the detail like i say and if we come out again it's not done too badly so the great thing is it keeps the structure of the shape so it looks very similar to the original which actually makes it a really important tool if you're in a rush you can use this for things that aren't going to be animated to keep their shape and it's actually really useful if i want to re-topologize this with some of the other methods so when setting up manual retopology it's good to have a decimated mesh to work on top of then your computer won't lag trying to snap to the really high poly mesh so often the workflow is to decimate your model hide the original and then re-topologise on the decimated model because it keeps its structure it's also useful for sending stuff off to be 3d printed to a 3d printing program to reduce the size of the mesh and the file sizes but keep the structure but as a retopology tool it creates really dirty topology and look at my previous video about what dirty topology actually means and the problems you'll have with that but we certainly wouldn't be able to use this for things like animating and it's not really very optimized so the advantages to the decimate modifier is it's easy to use it keeps its shape and it also shows you the poly count that you're going towards the disadvantages and it's a very big disadvantage is the awful topology that it creates okay so next up we've got the voxel and the quadriflow remesh now most of you if i select my wall object here will have seen this in the sculpting workplace and you can come across the remesh and remesh here with the voxel remesher you can also access it if i go to the layout mode you've got the object data properties here and you've got the remesh options there so that's the voxel remesher there and this has the same options as it does in sculpt mode now this isn't really meant for re topology but it's a quick and easy tool that you can use within blender without worrying about add-ons now the reason i've chosen this wall is because it's the sort of object that kind of works well with this let's duplicate it and move it to the side and let's remesh this object so i'll change the voxel size to something like .01 which is the default and i'll leave everything else as it is and nice and quickly we've got this remeshed object if i go into edit mode we can see it's about 5000 faces and it's fairly clean topology and it would work well to wrap around this object and bake the detailed information from this object to this low poly object and you could put it in things like games and so forth so it conforms to the object reasonably well but not particularly well enough for anything detailed let's quickly go to my beast model here i'll duplicate that and bring it off to the side and i'll change the voxel size to point one again and let's do a remesh okay so here you can see the problems that you'll get if you use this as a remesh tool it's not what it's really meant for but you can see the awful topology around here is it tries to work out the details and you've completely lost anything like the fingers and it basically just doesn't work so although it will work for basic objects that are very sort of blocky and it does make a quad based mesh it's really not suitable for anything with detail the reason is that these detailed sections will need a lot more topology than maybe the bigger sections in the middle of his torso so whereas it's okay here it's obviously not okay for the fingers and the voxel remesh does exactly that it takes a kind of grid approach and then puts it over the whole object so all the polygons are reasonably equal size although it does take into account some of the shape around here as you can see the quadrimeter is slightly different so if i click on the wall shift d and move it across and choose the quadro mesher it's got quadriflow remesh and this time it allows me to choose the number of faces i'll choose 5000 because that's the one next to it roughly and it does actually give me some options here about preserving sharp smooth normals and so forth but we'll just go with the default and press ok and see what it comes up with takes a little bit longer as you can see down here and let's see what we've got okay so if i go into edit mode we've actually got just under 5000 faces which is great let's choose this one and see what we had that one was actually two and a half thousand so i must have been looking at triangles but what you might notice if you look at them side by side is this one actually does try and follow the shape a little bit more let's take a slightly closer look at the topology it's still really even but it has deformed to the shape very slightly more than this one here so this one kind of curves around this section here whereas this one actually just adds a kind of loop cut in here so it's certainly got a long way to go before it's any sort of real retopology tool but it is a tool within blender that you could possibly use if you really want to be quick and you've got a very basic shape with no details so the advantages to the voxel remesh and the quadraflow is that it's very easy to use it produces quad based topology the disadvantage is that you can't have any detailed meshes with this unless you go to a really high poly count and then it's not really re-topologizing and to be fair it's not really meant for retopology it's meant for sculpt mode but it is an option next we have the poly builder tool now that's located down here so when you're in edit mode you can come down here and click on this item and then i can come into my mesh select some edges and pull them out like this so i can build them up i can still scale them down normally and i can control click and pull out a corner like this so it's a simple tool to make building a mesh a little quicker however you do still need to understand topology and there's a fair bit of setting up before this stage so that your mesh snaps to the object and mirrors to the other side and so forth i'll quickly show you a time lapse of me doing that here but i have to set up a mirror a shrink wrap modifier that's my preference anyway there's other ways of doing it i have to make sure that snapping's turned on then i can go into edit mode select my poly build tool and start building up my shape so it's a kind of newish tool since 2.8 and it does make things a little bit faster so a positive is that it can certainly speed up your workflow it is meant for retopology so you do get good edge flow you can kind of position all your faces exactly where you want them and make them small or big dependent on the detail of your mesh the downside is it takes a tiny bit of getting used to you do have to know your setup shrink wrap mirror and snapping you need a good understanding of topology and actually myself i find i just use the basic tools in blender rather than going across the polybuilder tool just because i'm used to the workflow a bit more but it is an option there that can speed things up for you okay so the next tool instant mesh is actually an external program but there is an add-on that you can access it through blender it's similar in some ways to the internal remesh quadriflow so you kind of have one resolution and it uniformly spreads it across the mesh so again it's good for bulky meshes with no details so no small protrusions such as fingers and it does have a tendency to distort small details like that in the same way as the quadriflow did with the beast model what it does have that's different is the ability to change the flow so if you have any obvious edges that you want it to flow across you can guide that flow along the lines of your mesh however this is not as easy as it sounds unfortunately and it's near impossible to end up with a good edge flow and topology however this is a great option for speed and if you're on a budget because it's free here i have a sculpted wolf there's the high poly version which is near 1.5 million faces this is the decimated version if i go into that you can see it's quite a dense decimation and you can see it's around a quarter of a million faces but that enabled me to take it into instant mesh and not have any problems like lagging and it coped very well this is the quadriflow remesh and it's done a half decent job but you can see sort of anomalies around the tail here and this is the instant mesh remesh and you can see because i was able to sort out that flow and direct it slightly it's slightly better than the quadriflow there's not a lot in it but it just hugs the shape a little bit better so the advantages are that obviously it's free so that's really great it's really quick you have some edge flow control which makes it better than the voxel remesh and the quadriflow remesh within blender the disadvantage is though that it's got a uniform resolution so it destroys smaller details the edge flow is difficult to control and it doesn't seem to have any options for mirrored meshes and there's some quirky issues with it like it sharpens all your faces and you have to unsharp them you must save your file with the obj extension and because it's free it's probably not going to be supported or updated very often next is the b surface add-on you have to enable this add-on so go to edit preferences add-ons and type in b surf and you'll get the b surface add-on just tick that and make sure it's enabled then in your tools under edit you'll have the b surface options this enables you to draw lines on the mesh and then turn them into quads this also sets up the shrink wrap modifier for you this is definitely a good time saver drawing lines on like this at the main flow of your mesh can be really useful and a good way to re-topologize so the advantages are that you're in control once again and you can dictate the flow of the topology it certainly speeds up your workflow considerably it has sort of a medium control i would call it so difficult areas like fingers where they're cylindrical you still have to go all the way around the mesh and it's quite awkward so the disadvantages are obviously you still need a reasonable understanding of topology in order to understand where to put the lines but you can see that as an advantage of having more control it's a little bit fiddly to get going and working with it's not really a beginner tool as it takes a bit of getting used to overall i would say this is a must-have for people who don't want to spend any money on retopology next we've got the paid for add-ons and i want to start with the quad remesher which i think is absolutely fantastic so we've got our mesh here from the voxel remesh and we can see it had lots of trouble when it came to the fingers i'll delete that and reproduce it so shift d grabbing the x axis and i'll do a much finer quadriflow remesh so i'll go to 15 000 faces and press okay okay so that's 15 000 and it struggled to do things like the fingers and the face the details in other places are quite good so if you've got a mesh that hasn't got those details you can get away with the quadriflow but it hasn't really worked in this case i'll undo that and i'll go even higher to 25 000 and i would say this is kind of the limit for a game character if you're trying to do it really quickly you shouldn't really reach apologize like this anyway for a character because you really need the edge flow to work for animation but let's say this was a statue so we've gone to 25 000 and we still haven't got the fingers in there and we still got a problem with the face instant mesh might handle this a bit better but it would still have problems around the details of the face area as you can see there okay so let's grab this mesh and pull it off to the side and this time we'll do the quad remesher so obviously it's an add-on and it comes in in your tools once again we can change the quad count here let's go to 15 000 so a little bit smaller than this one here you've got lots of really cool settings which will help you adaptive size is my favorite especially for things like characters where you've got these sort of minor details because it will adapt to the mesh so where it needs the detail it will put more polygons where it doesn't need it it will put less and that's the crux of why this is so good so i'll remesh it and you can see the progress down the bottom okay so it's finished and you can see it's managed to keep the details so the hands here compared to the quadraflow where the fingers have been chopped off or the face has gone all distorted the face details have been kept and it's actually done a fantastic job it's not even done too badly with the edge flow you can see it going around the arms here and the shoulders here as it distorts to the shape of the mesh it's actually quite a nice read topo job and you could even use this for animation in this case it's not always the case that it'll be this clean and nice but it does adapt and understand the flows of the mesh and it does it all automatically so you can imagine this is a massive time saver if we go into the face count we can see it's actually increased the faces so it's up to 26 000 even though i put in 15 and that's to do with the adaptive sizing and going around things like the fingers and the face so if you've got the adaptive size especially if you got it up even higher than this but it did a very good job at 50 you want to have a lower quad count so you don't get too many faces for me this fits nicely into my workflow especially if i'm doing something like a sculpt i can quickly re-topologize it like this and go into a multi-resolution modifier and really go up to things like 10 million and 15 million faces because the multi-resolution modifier is really optimized these days for sculpting but you have to have a fairly clean mesh to start off with and this does that for me i can then use this as my low poly mesh and bake all the information from the high poly i compose it paint it and all sorts i wouldn't say it completely replaces the need to reach apologize it's not really optimal for games although you can use it in that way but i can actually use this go into it tidy it up and reduce some of the polis in places so on the plus size it's really easy to use very powerful excellent for fast root topology it manages to keep the details so fingers and face details it adapts to the edge flow which is really nice it looks for edges and the contours and something i haven't talked about here but it's actually good for hard surfaces because it can detect the edges by the angle so it will put lines down hard edges so it's a very powerful tool on the downside it costs money it's 60 dollars for an indie license and a hundred and ten for a pro license and it still doesn't give you full control that you have if you're manually re-topologizing which brings me on to the next add-on re-topo flow which is re-top overflow three i'm using here this gives you the most control but it is more time consuming than something like quad remesher so you have absolute control of your edge flow and spacing of your polygons but you have to understand topology in order to do this of course it's much like manual topology but with lots of useful tools to speed up the bits in between so filling in big areas or the contour tool which goes around cylindrical parts like fingers or legs and arms can be extremely useful and save a lot of time it's a bit like using the b surface tool in some places where you can draw topology on but it has a lot more control once you've added that topology and you can kind of move it around join it together and so forth this i would say is definitely the option for the pro root topology artist because it gives you full control of exactly where you want the topology to go but it does speed the workflow up with all the helpful tools so the advantages are a very in-depth well thought through tool with lots of functionality it's a lot faster than manual topology because of all the tools but it has the same amount of control especially when it comes to things like cylinders it's quite a big pain to wrap a mesh around something like a finger whereas this will do it in seconds the disadvantage is that you obviously need knowledge of topology so it's not as nice as something like the quad remesher if you're a beginner and of course it's not as quick as something like the automated tools such as quad remesher also it can be very expensive for a hobbyist it's around 80 dollars but if you want to use blender professionally create characters and so forth then this is an absolute must now a couple of other add-ons worth looking up especially if you're on a budget now it's important to say i've not had a chance to try either of these but they're probably worth looking up if you're a hobbyist the first one is the tessellator which is quadrilateral remeshing it's similar to instant mesh but a little bit more precise and easy to use by the looks of things it looks like it's going to struggle again with details such as fingers and difficult areas like faces and you can't assign more faces to certain areas like you can with the quad remesher which is obviously a fair bit more money the other one is speed retopo and this is virtually free at only a dollar it seems a really interesting option for combining lots of the available tools into a more manageable interface needs a bit more research from me but i quite like the look of this one but perhaps if you use it then please comment below look at the comments and see what people are saying because it does look like quite a good one so that should give you a good overview of all the tools that are available i myself am using the quarry mesher an awful lot probably more than i should because it creates quite good topology i also plan on using ritopo flow a lot more when i start doing characters again as from only using it a little bit i found it a really huge time saver so that's a definite one for me as well in the past i have used instant mesh quite a lot and of course i use decimate all the time for quick but dirty retopology so hopefully this guide helps you and gives you some ideas do comment below with your thoughts thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 40,012

Rating: 4.9746094 out of 5

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, topology, retopology, edge flow, mesh, quads, tris, ngons, retopologize, building models, game models, models for games, 3d models, blender 2.8, 3d modeling, blender 3d, theory, retopoflow, quadremesh, quadriflow, quadriflow blender, blender addons, blender 2.9

Id: xWF49Zu-i-A

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021