Retopology for Beginners in Blender 2.8 - Retopo the Correct Way

hey guys any important front flip normals here in this video we are going to take a look at how you can do read apology in blender 2.8 this is our first real blender tutorial and we are very excited to bring you more 2.8 content as we are in the coming weeks and months so read apology is a real a big part of character sculpting now if you already know everything there is to know about like why do you eat apology and all these kind of things and you just want to know how to act in a blender just skip to the timestamp in the description and you don't have to hear about why no no lecture about the importance of read apology but for those who don't know what read apology is let's quickly talk about that so when you were sculpting characters or it could really be anything it could be CAD software data it could be really heavy models it could be from scans you know particularly when you're dealing with characters you're gonna have these really dense characters actors this can be sculpted in software like ZBrush or in blender this character here specifically is scope to the ZBrush but that doesn't really matter what matters is that you have an incredibly high res model which you can't really use for much now if you're just navigating around the viewport you can see that performance is perfectly fine there is another problem here the problem comes when we start to try to deform this object so if we now were to go into object mode or into edit mode here you can see like has an insane amount of points it's pretty dense pretty damn dense it has 150,000 Poly's which is far too much for a general rig to handle so if you were to give this to animator or if you just write a post as character it would be really painful so let's try to quickly just move some of these points around and you can just see how slow performances this isn't a pretty beefy system if you're sitting on a load to your laptop you aren't even gonna be able to select this maybe even not move around in the viewport no now if you look at the low res model and we do this you can see performance is instant you can deform this guy in a million different ways and you not gonna have any drop in performance what so ever so if you were to give this model here which is rigged to an anime they can animate it perfectly well and you can post it up and you can have a bunch of these on the scene so what you do is you will make this version from this you basically remodel the entire thing and then you will then in rendering then you will make this version here up here like either through a normal map or a displacement map so you get the best of both worlds you get a high-res details from this model and you get the performance of this model here and that that's essentially it why you Rick topology is there been a lot of questions as to why you do it now let's look into how you can actually depolarize in blender yeah so Reed apologizing in blender takes it's a little bit of setup and like we haven't really seen this kind of workflow be done before so that's why we thought we'd try to bring some of that like reach apology if that you've seen in other software or how you would do it out in the industry to into blender yeah so this this these techniques here should work for whatever is your modeling if it's for film or games or if you're just setting in you in your bedroom and home and want to do something yeah it's gonna work for anything there we are not using any add-ons for this which are external and we just using we're going to be using default tools and this is going to work really well before we get started we need to enable one add-on which is called the f2 Adam it f2 out on this if you don't know what you should just use it for everything when it comes to modeling it is honestly one of my favorite features of blender and it's amazing we looking more into that why it's so awesome later on now when it comes to reach apology we have now obviously we have our our low res mesh already made we're going to be recreating just a little part of this now we might do the whole thing later on but what we need to do is we need to have our high res model and we need to then make a single polygon and just populate this here with this single polygon we're just gonna start extruded and moving around all that before we do that we are going to make this guy unselectable because right now you're going to select my accent all the time the way we do this is if we go up here to the very right we can see we have some filters and restriction toggles so if we select the selectable one then you can see all we now have select ability as an option so if we now click on select ability for a high poly now we can no longer select it this is really important discuss it otherwise you are going to move it around and you're gonna be in a world of pain so what we're going to be doing now is we are going to create another and use a single plane from this from nothing there's a single polygonal plane yes because once you start reading pologize and you have to have points that you can extract you know other points from and the plane is just the most basic piece of geometry that we can just throw into the scene exactly so as a scale this guy up it too big and then we can move him up you and then we can start rotating around as well so this so we have an approximate placement where you want to put them we're going to be just be doing a tiny area around the mouth just so this we have some topology to actually play with so there are some setups we have to do now but the very first thing we're gonna do is we got to enable snapping so show you how this can work we go into edit mode and then we enable snapping up here the hotkey for this is shift and tap and then we're going to the snap options we going to we're going to enable face which is this can mean it's gonna snap to the polygon and then we're going to enable project individual elements as well so now if you were to use the Select tool just hit W a few times to do that there's a toggle between selection modes now you can see that it's actually snapping to the surface so this is a really powerful way of working there's now it just means you can you can now work with new topology on top of this old super-heavy base yeah you don't have to manually sit there and try to match the surface of your plane very painful that's why we do it before we will do Rita Pauline sculpting yeah we would just model this kind of stuff from an imagination it was an affront in societies and was awful so you can see there is a problem and that is that we actually can't see what we're doing so there are a few things we got to change here the very first thing is we need to go into the object context and then we need to go into viewport display and enable in front and now you can actually see what's going on another thing we need to do is we need to go under our viewport shading and we need to under options enable back face culling this is just so that you can't see what's on the other side of it otherwise there is just way too much information if you can see the back side of it the next up we are going to create a material for this guy so we just go under the materials tab it's a new material and we can't change the materials here and expect that to change because these are basic I'm only going to be appear in the rendering or when we render so what we need to do we need to go all the way to the bottom and have you port display and just give this a color now this is technically not needed this is just so you can actually see what you're doing a lot better I tend to give it like a fairly saturated color but I still a color nevertheless it's just so it helps you separate it from whatever you're read apologizing on top of yeah as well as when you start having a more complex model you can turn off the outline for the object so it doesn't interfere with the actual high-res object as well then we are going to enable a few modifiers modifiers is one of my favorite favorite things about blender for modeling and is such a powerful system if you go to hit the wrench key a wrench wrench icon we can go to modifiers another a few ones we're gonna enable the very first one is we got enable shrink wrap the shrink wrap just means that you can now snap things to the surface it's a very simple modifier but it does exactly we needed to it's just gonna it's kind of like if you had like some cellophane and you just wrap that around your face or your arm that's basically what it's doing now if we hit the little eyedropper tool we can set target and maybe make it selectable Yantra first that would help and now we go and there in this one selected room so now it's going to shrink wrap to it so if we were to move it around now you wouldn't really see a whole lot of difference but it means you just have slightly more accuracy we also need to just make sure that the cage is viewable in the viewport otherwise you're gonna have discrepancies between the the actual mesh and what you're seeing in the viewport and you want this to be exactly the same yes you might be wondering why you both need a shrink wrapper and you have the snapping turned on it's just for improved accuracy really so this way you when you're using the the snapping re oh sorry when you're using shrink wrap it just ensures that it's shrink wraps to your selected object and it doesn't like fly anywhere else so it's just like using snapping in conjunction with the shrink wrap or just gives you sort of like the best of both worlds then once we have our shrink wrap enabled now we need to set up the the mirror modifier the mirror modifier is awesome and it means that you don't really have to duplicate your mesh around and in other software you might have to do that but in blender you don't have to which is really nice so by default s is going to mirror and you can just now just see the changes in real time which is really nice there's one setting we just have to enable and that is clipping and that means that if we were to drag this to the center line now it's not going to go through it if clipping is off you can just see it's go it goes crazy you might want clipping on or off for a bunch of different reasons in general but whenever you're doing retopo you really want it to be to be enabled then if you have issues actually seeing what's going on here sometimes you do that I would intersects a bit too much and you get this we're not really seeing now but sometimes you do is you get this like really like flickering result then you can go add a modifier another displacement modifier displace modifier s is going to push it out of the surface so he's gonna like move that out for whatever point it is and just try to move it on its normal which is really handy if you if you do have some light issues if that happens just set like a really low value like point zero two point zero three something that we're not gonna be using for now but it is nice to know that if you do have display issues that you can actually do it with them yeah and those display issues are just that there is nothing wrong with the mesh or anything it's just a little annoying to look at yes I'm sure blender is gonna get an actual retopo view in the future which can make a lot of this a lot easier but for now we don't really have this is one thing I've seen a fair few times in blender tutorials when it comes to modeling and that is using the subdivision surface modifier when you are modeling now this is something you never want to have enabled when you're modeling and the reason is now when you start to drag it out you can see that there's a huge discrepancy between the cage and the end the actual generative topology so it just creates really messy topology and it's very hard to predict what is actually gonna going to look like you can use the subdivision modifier as a way to do sanity checks but you should never actually do your modeling with it you know when you're done you can tap in and out of your modeling you to view what it looks like with subdivision surface with the subdivision surface on but using it while you're modeling in a smooth view is something you should never actually do yeah this is what this is what I've seen a lot of people do they model like this and it looks really nice or it's terrible you really don't want this you want your mesh to look as honest as it can you don't want to have anything to which looks fancier or whatever you want to look exactly the way it actually is because otherwise you will cause issues down the line where it doesn't actually align properly yeah and just from a pure modeling perspective the final mesh that you have especially in a production you should be able to display and have all the details that you need to have displayed without a subdivision surface modifier on it it just needs to hold the shape the problem with the subdivision surface is that it can give you a false view of what your mesh actually looks like it'll maybe it occupies space in 3d that it shouldn't actually occupy this is something we're hopefully going to miss you we're going to see from us when it kind to future tutorials that we're gonna be really showing like how we model in production really like these legit techniques and that is this is one of them keep it all raw polygons nothing fancy so now we we have some some actual geometry here and let's look into the tools we're using the tools we are going to be modeling with are actually really simple some software Halleck could dedicate a retopo tools in blender we don't really have that there are some add-ons but again we aren't using that so the tools we're going to be sticking mostly to is it's really going to be extrude merge verts and just moving points around so it's very simple to do this now we can hit the two key this so we can switch to two edges and this is this is the way I prefer to lay down what apology I control the right mouse button and I can see it is lays out this awesome loops right away it's really quickly an efficient way to get like strips of polygons laid out very very nice so you just told me they're using the G key as well just moving stuff around with da key as well you can also use the G key to slide your points or your pull this around if you double tap G you know it's gonna just come in sliding on the surface this is something you are going to be using all the time when modeling as a tip as well when it comes to laying down your loops as you want them to be as clean as humanly possible the the Messier your topology is at this stage the Messier it's going to be I here I just want this to be spaced a bit more evenly and just to be look a little bit nicer yeah even spacing is really the key to topology a nice topology especially when you want to take it into sculpting or you want to reproject details later on the more even your spacing is the more consistent your detailed level is gonna be as well yeah exactly very important for that when it comes to moving the points around I'm simply just using the select tool just left mouse button and dragging on it very nice and easy then a tool we're gonna music a lot as well is just Dada edge loops tool and we can do that by selecting an edge and then just hitting ctrl R this is this is very nice and easy now we we just disappear just drag down on edge loop and then we can add more resolution here and then we can just continue to refine this what you're gonna be using this tool to loft if you want more resolution around here you can just drag a ctrl R and just start dragging hit the right mouse button if you want to be in the exact center of it but you don't you don't want to go to this dense early on this is just to show what the tools can total action do yeah the whole like the key principle behind reach apology is that right in the beginning you just want to block out your loops and you want to have as few loops to support your details as possible and then you can start to go in and add more details as needed that's probably the number one issue I see would Reta Paulo G is that people go way too dense way too early so we're gonna have a separate video on how to how to do really nice topology but for now we're just going to be showing you some showing the tools there's gonna be way more technical demo then one tool we are gonna be using a lot as well is just the extra tool that's you know basic modeling hit the e key and just drag we can also just scale it down as well all down the whole the middle mouse button and we can just scale down a little bit SM middle mouse button I really prefer to keep this straight from an early early time if they're like this and now you were to add a loop in the middle you see this is now but it now has to curve baked into it and you really don't want that you want this to really be flowing as nicely as you can so extrude is a tool you going to be using over and over and over again it really is the same tools we used before pulling down points control right mouse button but it's you just have a bit more control for this so then you again hit on the IDE key and then we can just start to scale it you can rotate with our key and move it around with the G key very very useful stuff then we have a tool which is we've just briefly mentioned before which is absolutely magical that is the F to add on now the F to add on I'm using specifically from one thing and that is if you want to add a pulley which is here the way you could do it of course you could extruder up and you can merge it or you can select this point at the F key so it's important to note that this will only work if you have four edges connected to a vertice yes or vertex otherwise it just like it doesn't add it correctly but it's a really quick way to do that but it's a really quick way to just block in a lot of Polish really quickly yeah this is one tools I'm using the most when I'm actually Rito point and blender like when it comes to retopo it's not about a hundred different tools it's about having a few tools which works really well and you just know them in and out so f/2 and extrude is really used a lot yeah and I think one of the main issues with reat apology or traditionally reach apology in blender is that you have access to so many add-ons that can do so many different things but it's very easy to lose sight of like why is she doing we topology and you focus too much on the tools and like what these fancy tools can do instead of getting the basic knowledge of free topology down first and then you can start it you know branching out and adding a lot of add-ons afterwards yeah it really isn't about finding the best item it really is about knowing the principles of this like when we've been mostly Rita Rita polygons in Maya and going into blender isn't that hard because the tools are the tools are the same so once you understand the theory offered it's not very hard to to switch to different add-ons or different tools whatever we might use then we also have a nice whole thing which is hitting alt said this just enables x-ray you can also do it up here this is really nice sometimes if you're actually to see the underlying surface burns if you're doing if you want to align this here to the nasolabial fold it's really hard to do this if you don't have x-ray enabled because then you you don't really see exactly where this yeah so I use this a fair bit as well what you could do as well if like it's more permanent thing you want to do you could add some transparency to your shader in the viewport for example so it just has a little bit of transparency so you could always look through it then we have a tool which is really useful as well this is just allows you to merge the verts emerge anything really so let's say we have and edge like so and we just delete this we want to merge this in this for some reason now the way we do this is just hitting the old end key and then we just do to Center and this is merges this the old end key is really annoying as you gotta move your hand so much and you know with time that's gonna contribute to carpal tunnel syndrome and all these kind of things but just this short term it's just really annoying yeah if the fact that you have to take both your hands off exactly so I recommend remapping that to something else we were sticking to default here because it would be a rubbish tutorial if not I don't want to start the tutorial with first you have to remap these 20 items no no WP rubbish and we have a tool which is which is really useful this is the bridge tool this is a tool you're gonna be using a lot so if we have a hole here you and you want to connect these two now you hit the F key and it's just going to bridge these two tools extremely useful now the F the F 2 add-on also allows you to do this as well instead of selecting these two you can select only one of them select this one and hit the F key this would be if something isn't merged you probably have some issues so if you if you do have issues where stuff is emerged you can select everything hit the a key alt n and then you can do by distance and it's gonna merge stuff around but let's just delete this guy you can also do sanity checking by enabling this as well and you can see if there is something wrong with you model but again you know remember to only use subdivisions as as a way of checking your progress on your model and shouldn't be used as a crutch for when you don't have enough detail another tool which you can which you can show you which is awesome this is thumb this is the grid fiddle feature so let's just add some detail up here now we are making look at some art it's almost a bit artificial just because we are we need to show you the tools we're going to be more going into specifically organic cases where you can actually use this later on but the grid fill is amazing so let's just select some loops here are some police so you want to fill in this area here there's something all the time when it comes to to eat apology you want to fill in this area here and everything is matching you can just see it is so straight up grid so what you can do you can open up the search feature which depending on how your you set up is probably outer space bar or it's the f3 key in my case it's space bar type grid fill and then hit enter and now you can see just by magic it just fills it in actual 3d magic actual free magic now if we go under the settings here you can see we have offset as well because sometimes it doesn't come in correctly the math is still correct that everything connects up properly but it just isn't it just doesn't align properly I've had this be a particular issue when you have circular objects like cups or spheres or something like that at the top of the poles it just sometimes it just can't guess which way you want it to face so that's where the offset comes in really handy the thing is really knowing the blender country do you mind I heard that comes in blender to actually neural link at surprise wouldn't be surprised another one which is really useful is proportional modeling or just soft selection it you can enable that but going up here and proportional editing and now we can click a single point it the G key and then we can scroll up and down to change the fall-off of it this is really useful if you just want to move stuff around like bigger chunks around where you can [Music] really change it the good thing is snaps to the surface as well because of our our shrink wrap modifier and this is a pretty common way to actually do tweaks to your topology because you don't have to move one word at a time yeah it becomes very painful if you have to move everything so this is a really good way of doing it again I can enable proportional editing up here or the hotkey is oh now this is a really cool trick as well will show you which it revolves around using the sculpting tools to relax your mesh if we go into object mode and then we go all the way to top left we can now enable sculpt mode now you have a lot of scope brushes which we'll cover in a separate tutorial we can now use the shift key to smoother around we can use left mouse button or a tablet whatever using to actually move around here now the problem with this though is that you can't actually see what you're doing that well here it's pretty low rest but once it's more high rest you can't even see the topology so we have to go into an our viewport overlays and enable wireframe and then we can start to smooth it around use the F key to make the brush bigger or smaller and then we're gonna start to smooth around the nice thing about having the this being you know a procedural system with modifiers is that now it's still being it's being shrink wrapped to your mesh now live while you're while you're smoothing it out so you don't have to like shrink wrap it again or anything that's one of the really powerful powerful things about having modifiers in blender make sure to disable wireframe once we're done with this as well yes sir there's no reason to have around and then we switch this back to object mode and now the tab key is now going to toggle correctly between edit mode and an object mode and those are really the tools you need in order to get started with them we do topology it is very simple when you really look into it so with all this said let's just delete everything apart from this point it's point control I and then we can delete faces and then we can start just you look at super quick demo now this we will do a separate tutorial on this in in the near future we just want to show you how you can actually do this because there's been a lot of information out and you might be a bit overwhelmed you might think oh god these guys are just no but like yeah I think one of the issues traditionally has been especially with a lot of this kind of stuff and blender is that there hasn't really been a lot of outside voices who have used tools in production so we're kind of hoping you know to to bring some of that knowledge that we've gained through production experience and then bling it bring it to the blender community to be able to like help people and give you some more in-depth training of how to actually get ready for working in the industry whether you're using blender Maya or max you know it doesn't it doesn't really matter to us yeah we're really excited to get you started with this mail and I think you know with all the excitement about 2.8 it's there's so many more people that are just flowing into the blender community now so that's why we're hoping you know to enter the market at a good time so that we can help as many people as possible it's such an interesting tool as well I'm really enjoying modeling in blender can be a bit frustrating times when you're new to it but it's it's a really powerful tool it's been a really nice change for me actually because I started in 3d studio max and you know in in max we had modifiers as well went went to Maya and been using that for most of my professional career and now going back and using a self were like blender which has modifiers again it's I've always loved modifiers and it was always so sad to me that I couldn't have them in Maya after leaving Max is actually the same it's such a cool system yeah yeah I guess you had Animoto yeah no no no but I had a Maximus max peers as well you can see here when it comes to Rito point like this is all real time and you can see just in like so you can lay down some really cool loops whenever you're doing this it's really important that you keep it very clean like for instance now this is this I've been thinking about this has the same amount of spans now I can just go here and just hold on the F key and it just boom you just boom do this and then then we already fill this area end and then we can just go in and just refine a little bit if you want to add this is something we actually just forgot to tell you and in the first part now with the tools if you want to add new topology around the eyes for instance you can easily do this if you deselect everything just click an empty area and you control right mouse button somewhere now now you can just start to add like add down verts if you're in work mode or add down edges if you add in edge mode so this is really cool because now we already have an edge here and we can hit the extrude key and we can just move it down now so now we can just start to move this around so it fits but fits around the eye again keep it do it do it properly methodically and don't move away from this until it's done and once it is done then you can just start to move it around rotate it around and there you go you could also do what we did before as well just control right mouse button and just do that hit the F key to blend between these two and now we can hit the gg just you like slide it between it yeah so there's no there's no real magic behind reach apology it is slow methodical work it's it can be either therapeutic or boring yeah how long you been doing it for and also the complexity of the character that every topology of course but like the methodical workflow is just lay down the main loops don't get bogged down with too many details in the beginning you know you might look at the Browse here and the eyes and thing with us not nearly enough detail to support the the face and that's true but you know that always that comes later yeah yeah whenever I've been doing right apologies for production I'm always really liking in the first few days and then yeah week 2 comes around yeah it's like it's a it's a puzzle in the beginning and then once it turned into pure tweaking you just just want to end yeah I know you're feeling so you can see here I'm really just doing simple tools I mean really is using very simple tools here and no f2 I know the actual key just you add on to do this kind of things okay I never know what blender yeah so you once you one should just get some of this into in muscle memory it becomes very quick to do this let's just fill these guys up as well [Music] but yeah we won't take this too much further because we are gonna do a whole separate row I'm actually doing this but yeah that's basically it for how to read apologize in blender we really gonna try to bring you these more like industry techniques in in the coming weeks and months is really showing you how we would approach this and get from like a sporadic let's just try out the tools but from like a slow methodical proper way of doing doing it which is just tested time and time again so um and also be sure to you know give us some feedback on if there's anything specific you would like to see or anything you want us to clarify especially when it comes to working inside a blender because I think there's a lot of potential in this software and there's a lot of room for growth both in the community and for the software itself so you know we really want to help out as best we can here yes we will see you next time and make sure to LIKE comment subscribe and hit a notification bell as well if you want to see more particular tutorials in the future you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 719,207

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, concept, maya, tutorial, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, substance painter, education, pixologic, art, art fundamentals, art school, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, gumroad, marvelous designer, mari, blender guru, free tutorial, cgi, cg, blender 2.8, blender 3d, b3d, retopo, retopo blender, retopology, blender foundation, blender modeling tutorial, topology blender, Retopology blender, 2.8

Id: CuQzPDs99yM

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019