Retopology in Blender - Retopoflow Addon

hello blenderheads and welcome to 2021 as promised i've been working on the final chapter in our retopology series and this video is going to be covering the paid add-on re-topo flow now having recently used both the default blender retopology tools and the speedry topo add-on i can honestly say that i think ritopo flow is easily the most powerful way to do retopology in blender and at least for me has been worth the price tag that comes with it now the developers have recently released ritopo flow version 3 so if you were thinking of getting this add-on now is probably a good time to jump on the bandwagon for those of you who don't have disposable income to be able to get this kind of an add-on check out the previous video on the speedry topo add-on which is free and it does a lot of the same things although it is missing a couple of useful tools there will be a link in the description below now to test this add-on we're going to need a model to re-apologize and there's a couple of tools in this add-on where the spyro model from our previous lessons i just feel it's not going to be the best model to be able to demonstrate this with so for this tutorial i'm going to be giving you access to the gremlin model from some of my previous sculpting videos now the final gremlin model came in at around about five million polygons and i know that some of your systems probably aren't going to be able to handle something quite that dense so what you'll get is this model here which has been decimated to around about 320 000 faces in fact if we just turn off the claws and some of the mouth stuff you can see over here it's just over 320 000 faces and if i just turn on the wire frame you can see that this has been decimated this model is completely unusable for animation but it's perfectly fine for doing re-topology so i'm hoping that everybody's system is going to be able to run with this many polygons and look if if if your system can't feel free to go back and use the spyro model from the previous lessons there will be links to both the gremlin model and spyro in the description below so to get the gremlin model click the link below and it will take you to this gumroad page even after decimating this model the blender file still comes out at around about 35 megabytes and unfortunately with files that big gumroad forces you to put a price tag on the download so you can see here i've got just got him up there for two dollars fortunately you can still add codes and stuff to gumroad so feel free to use the free code at checkout and you can still download this guy for free so you've got two options you can either download the blender file which is this one here and it comes with the claws and the mouth and all these extra little pieces as well as a simple lighting setup or you can download the fbx file now the x fbx file is just the gremlin body so it's not going to have all that extra geometry such as the claws and the teeth or the lighting set up the claws and the teeth and stuff they have some sculpted detail in them and all of the models together still come up to over 1 million polygons so the fbx is for those of you with slightly slower computers that maybe can't handle that many polygons also the fbx means that you can then import this model into any other application that you like so select which model you would like to download i'm just going to use the blender scene in this case and then go down to the name a fair price section now you have to put in at least two dollars here and click the i want this but once you get here you can go to the discount code type in free give it a moment and then you can just hit the get button now if you're feeling generous you do have the option of paying the two dollars or whatever you think the model is worth and that would definitely be appreciated all of it goes towards helping this channel grow but it's by no means a necessity back in blender if you've downloaded the fbx you can go and import that or if you've got the blender file you can simply open it in our case we'll be working with the blender file for this tutorial okay so now we've got a model but do you have the ritopo flow add-on yet if not click in the link in the description below and it will take you to the blender markets ritopo flow page which looks like this here you can buy your copy of retopoflow it's currently priced at 86 once you've gone through the process of purchasing you can go to your orders page scroll down until you find your ritopo flow add-on uh in my case actually bought this as a pack of three different things so just go to your downloads page find wherever the ritopo flow is and download the add-on try and save it somewhere smart where you'll know where you can find it again in my case i actually have a scripts folder specifically for blender i know i've already downloaded this before so i'm going to cancel in this case and let's jump back into blender to install the add-on just go to edit preferences make sure you're on your add-ons uh page here and just click the install button again make sure that you've got this somewhere saved somewhere clever again i've got a scripts folder with a couple of different programs but we want blender specifically and now you just need to find the read topo flow add-on i'm just going to type flow into the search bar here find this very very useful when you've got lots of add-ons and double-click to install it now in my case i've actually already got this installed but usually when you install a new add-on it will pop it up here and you just click to activate that and you should see the little re-topo flow menu here get added to your screen okay so you've got a model you can work with you've got the add-on installed let's finally start doing some re-topology now the first thing that you're going to want to do is decimate your mesh so this mesh has already been decimated you can see that he's got some really triangulated topology here but i do just kind of want to walk you through that process so down here i've got one of my earlier scenes done this is essentially the same model but this is before i read apologize it so you can see if i go and toggle overlays and turn the wireframe on here we've got a really really dense mesh and there's spots where extra detail has been needed to be added this is all done with dyn toppo so you can see the other one's a mess this one's even more of a mess and this one's coming in at just over three million polygons so let's just disable that because it's difficult to look at in fact let's just turn off wireframe here that's better uh so you can see we've got re-topo flow up here also installed so let's click on that and you can see here it's got performance issues sources are too large greater than one million so it's recommended that you work with source meshes that are under a million polygons now technically you you can still go in here and create your initial target and and i i've tested it it does work it's just really really slow so what you want to do to get this three million polygon model down to this um 320 odd thousand hang on let me just hide these so we can actually get a profit count uh so around about 10 percent or so is select your mesh go and add a decimate modifier unsubdivide is really good if you've already done decent topology so it works really well with quads it will not work well here so you probably just want to be using collapse probably not a bad idea to have symmetry turned on for this and then just grab your ratio and drop it to you know 0.1 or something now i'm not going to do it in this case because it will take like a minute or two to kind of crunch through all of those polygons okay so back in our pre-decimated model file here let's go and so this is how you you create your retopologize mess your target mesh as it calls it here click this button now before we do that there's one last little tip that i do want to throw you away if we just go over to view here you can see we've got our 3d cursor now it's currently set to zero zero zero that's good just as a demonstration i'm just going to offset this a little bit so you can see now we've got the 3d cursor let's just kind of give it some some random nothingness and just offset it over there somewhere so now when we go in here and go and create our target mesh give it a moment it'll have to go through its little loading process we get a little welcome message here that you can disable this once you get used to it although i recommend letting it pop up the first couple of times just until you get used to some of your keyboard shortcuts but let's go and close that for now and one of the things that kind of annoys me a little bit about re-top overflow is that it doesn't turn on symmetry automatically you have to go and do that manually i'd say 95 of the time whenever i'm re-apologizing it's symmetrical so probably worth having that on by default but turn that on now when this is working you'll usually get a little red line going down the center let's just go and add something anything here drag that across there and you can see that just doesn't seem to matter what i do i don't get anything so let's just tab and drop out of here you can see that it has created our mesh very top overflow but it's gone and offset it over here which is breaking our symmetry so we're going to need to delete that and make sure that our 3d cursor is set to zero zero zero if you don't do that as you can see it breaks so now let's go back into free topo flow recreate our mesh again it'll have to quickly run through its little loading sequence it's a little bit faster because it's already done at once close that again make sure that symmetry is turned on and now you can see we're getting a little red line down here and if i go and just grab our contours thingy here you can see that now we can start to draw things i'll just undo that so we can talk about our tools next but yep that's just something that if you don't make sure that's set properly it'll break the entire thing so make sure it's set properly when you start up so just a couple of things about the interface first of all symmetry doesn't get turned on automatically which we've already discussed turn that on assuming that you need it which will probably be most of the time then you've got all of your tools down the side here first of all you can automatically select those by just going one two three four five six seven eight up to eight then contours for one again so you've got uh just your your numbers to get to those you've also got uh what's called the tilde key to bring up a little um a little pie menu here uh so the tilde key is that little one right in the top hand corner between the tab and the number one on most normal keyboards that little strange squiggly line there is called the tilde there's your little random tip of the day so we can do that to bring up once again all of those tools again so let's go through these tools one by one so rather than starting at the top with the contours tool here despite it quite possibly being my favorite of all of these tools let's start down here with the poly pen and the loop tools because these are the tools that are they're pretty similar to the ones that we've been using in the previous videos so this will be a good place for us to start so the poly pen tool is very similar to blender's inbuilt poly builds tool you use it to create individual polygons let's just zoom in on his chest here because this is a nice big area for us to work with hold down the control key so you can see when we hold down control we get a little green dot here and if i click and drag away we start to get our first edge and if we move our mouse over here you can see that we can create our first triangle by clicking from here you can either leave it as a triangle or if you continue to hold down control and click you can now get your first quad and of course we can still come in here and move these around if we so desire you can just click and drag or if you click on either a vertex or an edge or whatever you can hit g and move things around as well so from here to create your next quad you want to try and click on one of these edges here and depending on which edge you click on will determine where you can build your next polygon so i just want to kind of build this across his chest here so let's keep this one selected and again i can just hold down control and do a couple more clicks and we get our next polygon now you can see that it's got both of these edges selected it's a fairly clever tool in that now i can either hold down control and i can start clicking out here to create these edges or if i spin my mouse around here i can also create them going down so just as an example i can click down there and i could start going down the chest and if i wanted to go back across his chest i just have to click again on this edge and i can once again start going across now most of the time you're going to be wanting to be creating um quads here you do have the option of just creating tries generally speaking you want to be creating quads unless you're kind of you know forced into a like under an armpit or something where you can sort of um terminate some edges and create tries so to make this a little bit faster if we come under our poly bend poly pin tri quad options over here we have a couple of different options so the moment we've got it set to tri quad which allows us to do this create a try and then create a quad or we can select quad only and let's just say i want it to uh start going down towards his tummy here now in fact this is going to make it a little bit more difficult i just want to shift these across a little bit first and now i can just create quads and i don't have to worry about creating doing that first step of creating a try and then having to click again to create a quad so now i can very quickly just go bang bang bang bang and build in a whole heap of quads very very quickly uh you also have the option of choosing try only which will as you would expect to create nothing but triangles similarly you also have the edge only which will allow you to just create your edges if you click properly just undo that go over here and make it so it's a little bit easier to see you can see that you can just create edges uh and it doesn't fill in the faces but uh these are fairly use case you you probably won't be using them all that often they'd be for very specific circumstances most of the time i'd say uh use the quad only if you've if you've got some nice big areas that you want to quickly lay out and then swap over to tri quad if for some reason you uh need to just quickly do a single triangle and your poly pen tool is kind of your go-to tool if you want to shift around what you've created so i can see here that i've got a bit of a these polygons are stretched a little bit so if i just come in here and select all of those edges i can double tap g oh actually no i can't do that with this one i've got to use the loops tool when you're using the poly pen it just allows you to move things around a little bit by using the g key it uses all the blender defaults so i could also come in here and rotate this if i felt like it or scale it as i feel like it and that's kind of it for the polypen tool it's it's fairly simple in terms of what it can do but it's very powerful now the loops tool is also really simple in fact of all of these tools it's probably the simplest it inserts edges that's basically it so i can hold down control and i can insert a whole bunch of edges the only other thing that it does similar to the polypen tool is that you can still rotate and scale and in this case if you hit g you can actually slide edges you see that's sliding up and down the chest there whereas if i go back to the poly pen tool i can actually i've got fairly full control over where i want to move it so loops for sliding poly pin for actually moving and separating so that's the simple tools out of the way let's start talking about ritopo flow's more powerful features so let's start just by you can tap see a lot of your blender shortcut keys still work here so you can tap a to select all or deselect and you can hit delete and you've got all of these options again very similar to uh blenders so let's just delete all of these vertices and let's jump over to the contours tool hey blender heads quick interjection here as i realized i forgot something and it's kind of important or at least it was confusing to me the first time i encountered it so let's say you've done a little bit of retopology here and then for whatever reason you hit tab and you go yes i'd like to exit read topo flow and just go back to my normal layout here and then you go okay i've done whatever it was i needed to do back out here in my my normal layout and i want to go back into re-topo flow so under here we don't actually have an update for that we can create a new target but as you would expect that creates entirely new geometry and doesn't actually connect back to our original mesh here and none of these other options get us there either what you need to do is go into edit mode and you can see here we get a little bit of an update we've still got all these options here we've also got this little diamond shape click on that and it will reboot you back into re-topo flow you can go back in and continue doing what you needed to do now as i said before this one is probably my favorite tool mostly because it does stuff that none of the other tools that we've discussed in previous videos can do so the contours tool has one very simple but specific purpose it creates topology for tube shapes so arms legs tails not that we really have much of a tail in this case so again to activate it you need to hold down the control key you can see we get the little kind of cursor symbol there and if we just click and drag across here we get a little yellow line and if we release we get our edges and vertices have been created and you see we've got this little 12 number here that's how many edges we've got around the arm and if we go over to our options here we have the option of increasing or reducing these you can also hold down shift and use your mouse wheel to scroll and you can see that we can add more or less in this case i actually think 12 is kind of what i would usually use for an arm so let's leave that as it is so to create your your actual polygons again hold down control click and drag and it goes and creates your uh your first string of polygons it kind of bridges between those two and you can very quickly just scroll down the arm here let's straighten that up a little bit and you can see very very quickly we've pretty much just re-apologized an entire arm now another thing that i really like about this tool and i think it's only been added in one of the recent updates it's smart enough to kind of know where this this kind of tube shape begins and ends so you can see even though i've got this edge selected down here if i go nah i reckon i can squeeze one more in up here around the shoulder it still manages to go and create that and even though i've got that one now select at the top if i want to start doing his wrist here see most of the tools will will bridge or extrude or whichever action you happen to be doing from your selection but this one just seems to be uh particularly clever in that it can detect whereabouts the uh the tube begins and ends very cool very clever programming there now also keep in mind that if you have a gap between some of your rings so let's just make sure we've got contour still selected here double click on this let's just delete these vertices so we create a hole in there if i double click on this ring here and then double click on this ring here and hit enter you can see that we can very quickly bridge that gap and unfortunately you can't just use your shift and uh scroll wheel to add any extra loops in there so we will need to just quickly jump back to our loop tool and punch that loop back in there so going back to contours like the other tools you do have the option of doing your scale and rotate and grab and everything so let's just go and grab a loop here if we use the g tool you can see that we can kind of go up and down uh if we scale i don't expect scale to work particularly well here because it should just kind of reproject itself and in this case it kind of reprojects itself back onto the target mesh in a not particularly nice way so maybe avoid using the scale when using the contours tool the grab tool works reasonably well i quite like the rotate tool so if we just grab this one here you can see we've got a little bit of a kink in our topology here so if i rotate i can actually rotate kind of around the uh the arm so that's the contours tool it is predominantly used for creating this kind of tubular geometry so let's select all of that and delete that let's move on to our poly strips tool the poly strips tool i have to confess it's probably probably my least favorite of all of these tools i find it a little bit can be a little bit tricky to predict but as the name suggests it's really quick at laying down strips of polygons so again if we hold down the control key here and we just draw a line across you can see that we get a strip of polygons and you can see that we've got these kind of handles here we've got the uh the white little dots and our black little dots so if we click and drag on the white ones it allows us to kind of shift the shape of our strip same here and if we grab the black ones it allows us to kind of use them as sort of bezier curves so we can get a little bit of extra shape in here as you can see though i'm getting some slightly weird projection and as i move it around it can um it's actually not doing a terrible job here but it can kind of wrap around things a little bit of a strange way i always want to try and use it relatively small areas rather than like i i probably wouldn't try to say wrap it around the shoulder or something here although once again it's not done a truly terrible job the other thing is you can see that when we hold down control we get the uh this little brush symbol here we can also tap f to change the size of this brush so if we wanted some very very small polygons we can do that or we can make it really big and we can get some very large polygons just remember that we are doing re-topology here so the idea is to try and have as few polygons as possible oh and that will yeah this is where i mean that some of the projections can be a little weird i think that was because i accidentally snapped it to the arm over there so like with a lot of these tools let's just get all of this stuff out of our way again if i uh let's just get this to a nice size if i draw a strip of polygons there as with most of these tools you have the option of holding down shift and using your mouse wheel which can then determine just how many polygons you want just keep in mind that uh going to some really high or really low numbers can do some strange things you can see here that as i start to push it closer to 20 or above i start to get some strange shapes and once i start coming back down to that five or six you can see that it hasn't actually gone back to our original shape so you do just want to be a little bit careful don't you're unlikely to want to be scrolling this above 20. likewise if i scroll it all the way down to 1 i actually now can't scroll back up and i'd have to hit the undo to get back to our original generally speaking you're not going to be going down to one you'd just use the poly pen tool for doing a single polygon likewise you're unlikely to want to be cranking this above even 12 in this instance is quite a lot of polygons so you're unlikely to encounter that it's not quite a bug but as i say you're unlikely to encounter it now something i find a little disappointing about this tool let's just uh go back to a slightly more normal number of polygons you can't actually join these so i couldn't say click on this edge or this face over here and try and draw another strip then going down here it won't join them you'd have to manually do that with uh with the poly pen tool um likewise i couldn't say grab this and start dragging down there it uh this is the wrong tool for doing that our strokes tool will cover this actually something i just realized i haven't discussed with the polypen tool is uh you can this has a auto merge feature so if i grab this vertex here and snap it to there and snap this one to here you can you can join your islands of geometry manually so yes remember that you have an auto merge feature here so if we were wanting to join some of our geometry here we can swap over to the strokes tool now this tool is probably my second favorite tool after the contours contours does some things that most other tools can't do but the strokes tool is probably the most versatile tool in the re-topo flow kit so let's just say that i wanted to start building up towards his neck here i've got the strokes tool selected let's double click to select this edge here and from here i can just draw in another line and it will kind of bridge between those you can see that it's given us what's that two edge loops in there so again if i hold down shift i can scroll up or down to increase or decrease number of edges going between there likewise under our options i can go down here and you can see that it's defaulted to uh to two spans so i will always get two through there generally speaking let's just draw that in i actually like to have this set to zero or set to one it just gives me more control over where i want these lines to come in so like with the polystrips tool this also has a brush size so the smaller i make my brush you can see the more spans i get the larger i make my brush the less spans i get you can also just completely avoid this go over to fixed and now it will give me that complete control where every single line that i draw will just be a single one unless i decide to change it in 21 is probably a few too many let's just swap that to two now if i draw you can see that oh that's because we don't want to actually be using these uh spans here we want to use the fixed span so if i change that to two and now draw you can see that we get out two spans and i can always still use my mouse wheel to bring that up or down as i said i like to have this set to one it just gives me kind of complete control over uh how many spans i get in there and i can always use my mouse wheel and shift to add more if i feel like i need them now with the strokes tool we don't always have to start with a piece of geometry so if i select all of this and delete everything there's no reason that i can't draw my first line manually yes it seems like a good number and then draw in my second line third line so we don't actually have to start from a piece of geometry to make this work also keep in mind that you don't need to do an entire edge loop here you can just say select these two if you want and start bringing these down likewise i can swap over to this top edge loop and start drawing over here or i could start going down the shoulder if i felt like it we can also just start a completely new piece of geometry by deselecting everything and just coming down here and starting a new you can see that's giving me a little bit of a strange projection over here but i can just kind of move that back manually so you can see that with all the versatility that this tool offers you can very quickly uh add you know some really big pieces of geometry so i tend to use the strokes before i use the poly polystrips tool i just find it much more useful so the strokes tool very very good at very quickly adding large chunks of geometry to your model now the other tool that's also really good for adding big chunks of geometry as well as bridging between some of these islands that we've created here is the patches tool let's just start by deleting everything here just for an example now one thing that you have to remember about the patches tool is that it can't create geometry all by itself so you can see i hold down the control here and i click and drag and i right click and i middle button and it just it doesn't doesn't do anything by itself you have to you have to have something to start with so unlike the strokes tool where i can very quickly just draw in whatever i want patches tool requires some stuff to get started so with those in place let's demonstrate how the patches tool works so let's just i'm just going to build this down here a little bit further and let's grab the poly pen tool here i'm just going to delete these faces here and create a bit of a gap between everything oops let's delete faces rather than edges so you can see i've got these uh two edges at the top selected these two edges at the bottom if i go over to the patches tool you can see that it immediately starts trying to build something in between those and it's kind of guessing at just how many polygons i want at the moment so again if i hold down shift and scroll up and down i can add or remove extra edge loops so let's do something that kind of makes these reasonably square and then all you have to do is hit enter and it goes and fills in that gap very very nicely but what's really cool about this tool is you don't just have to do this kind of a to b selection it will also do these corners so if i double click in here and select all of those edges going across there and then hold down shift and select all these edges going down here you can see that it tries to patch in between those as well now in this case it's i think we've overcooked it a little bit it's trying to connect to the arm but if i maybe just deselect that edge there just because this was overhanging the arm a little bit i think it got confused but you can see that now we can fill in this entire strip going down through here so again if i just hit enter bang massive chunk of geometry just added now what we've created here is actually a really good example for some of our next tools you can see that up here we've got some reasonably clean polygons particularly if i just go and add some extra edge loops through there they're reasonably square they're nicely laid out whereas and these ones are they're kind of a little bit all over the place like you'd really want to sort of come in here and try to square these up and that starts to feel like a fair bit of work so to fix these kind of problems we have both the tweak and the relax tool now the tweak tool is pretty similar to say some of your sculpting brushes where you can kind of brush and drag around individual vertices so if i just come in here i can start to move these individually and just sort of square them up a little bit make that look a little bit neater just like with your sculpting brushes you can change the size of your brush with f and now i can move around a whole bunch of vertices all at once let's also bring up our tweak menu here and our brush options because this also changes our size you can use the shift f to control the strength and you can see as we get further and further away from the center point it gets uh more and more transparent the closer we get to the center the stronger it gets so now we'll have a really high strength and if i do shift f and drag it fair way away you can see that well at this point we've got almost no influence it's just shaking a little bit there but it's very subtle generally speaking i have it set fairly high because i want a fair bit of control uh you can also use ctrl f which will determine your fall off so we now have fairly high fall off one of the things is that these brush options as you change brush sizes etc they uh they don't generally update until you kind of mouse over them so you can see strength is set fairly high here let's set it really low in fact it's set to basically zero here uh and yet over here it's still saying 0.9 until i mouse over it and then it drops considerably just a little bit of a ui update that doesn't instantaneously happen so you use the tweak tool with a small brush to just kind of move around individual vertices make the brush a little bit bigger if you want to move around a larger selection but if you want to use something that's maybe generally speaking at least a little bit quicker you can swap over to the relax tool which kind of works a little bit like a smooth brush in um in your sculpting tools so as you can see if we just kind of click and drag it sort of tries to uh well smooth and relax these out a little bit and it also seems as though it tries to keep the polygons a fairly similar size so you can see that just with a quick relax we can really smooth out the general shape of all of our polygons here and get something that's that's quite nice just do keep in mind that the relax tool does seem to have a few limitations if you push it too far so let's see if i can't get it to do this let's just go to the poly pen tool i'm just going to why is that that should be set to quad i'm just going to sort of drag these over a little bit and you can see now just because we've got just a tiny little bit of a gap there if i come back to my relaxed tool it actually sort of pushes them away from each other so for some reason you don't have a perfect center line going down here if there's just a little bit of a gap you can actually separate your center line geometry which is generally not what you want and i have had a couple of occasions where say i was working inside of an armpit where we're smoothing it can just kind of overlay some of this geometry and give you some unpleasant results generally speaking particularly for these large areas i find that it works very very well just keep in mind that you may occasionally want to switch back to your tweak tool just to give yourself some fine tune control and then you can always switch back to the relaxed tool which once again starts to do a good job so that's a little bit of a crash course on retopoflow i i'm hoping that that's enough for you to sort of jump in and start using this add-on remember that all the links that you'll need will be in the description below uh including a link to download this gremlin model as well as links to the rig topo flow blender market page uh if you've got any questions kind of about read topology in general feel free to post them in the comments below although ritopo flow isn't you know isn't my add-on feel free to post any questions that you might have and i'll i'll do the best that i can to answer them obviously i can't like do uh you know bug fixes or anything like that but just general questions i will do my best to help answer them and that's all folks have fun re-topologising

Channel: Jamie Dunbar

Views: 15,368

Keywords: Blender, retopology, creature, tutorial, Blender 2.9, topology, gremlin, retopoflow

Id: dagHqlydUHQ

Length: 35min 52sec (2152 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021