Retopology in Blender - Speed Retopo Addon

hello again blenderheads and welcome to part two of the everything you need to know about read topology series now this is a crash course and getting started with retopology and blender so we won't be going over absolutely everything just the stuff that you need to know so in part one we covered the absolute basics using only blender's built-in tools and we also talked about some of the issues that you might run into while re-apologizing so if you're just starting out with retopology i'd strongly recommend going back and watching that first video as it's going to give you a solid understanding of retopology and blender without all the bells and whistles that could be confusing if you're just a beginner on the other hand if you're specifically here because you want to speed up your retopology game by using the speed ray topo add-on then let's jump in the first thing that you're going to want to do is download the speed rig topo add-on now you can get that from either the gum road or the blender market sites both links will be in the description downloading from gumroad means that you can get it for free so that's possibly the best place to get it that said this add-on is really really good and it's probably worth at least 20 or so so if you're in a position to do so i'd strongly recommend supporting the developer and paying the one dollar where you can get it off blender market that'd be really nice of you so once you've downloaded the add-on from whichever site you'll want to install it and the installation is the same as most of the add-ons in blender simply go to edit preferences go to the add-ons tab which i've already got selected here and then go and click on install navigate to wherever you've downloaded your folder now in my case i have a blender scripts folder specifically for all of my scripts and add-ons do a quick search for speed re-topo and just double-click on the python file and that will bring up the add-on here click on it to initiate it and then we've got all of our additional options down here now by default speedry topo uses this tools panel over here let's just bring that back up which i actually think might be a little bit of an oversight in the coding or maybe something's happened since blender's been updated but just for ease of use i always like to change this to tool so that it matches all of my other add-ons and it'll now appear under this menu under speedry topo now don't worry too much about these other settings pretty much all of these can be tweaked within the add-on itself the only thing that i might tweak just for my personal preferences is here where we've got starting free topo from vertex i like to use the b surface don't worry we'll go over all of these so you'll know which one that you want to personally work with but i'm going to choose b surface and then close this out so to start with i'm just going to go and toggle my overlays back on and you can see just how bad our read topology is here you can see here under reaped speedry topo it's got select an object so let's select the object that we're planning on re-apologizing which is the spyro body here and you can see now we get all of these options in fact i'm just going to minimize some of these so it's a little bit easier now as we said before this is the start retopo with options like i say i really like to use the b surfaces to get started with but let's go over the vertex and poly build just so you know what they do and what the differences are now when i first got this add-on i found this part a little bit confusing i thought that maybe you got different options depending on which one you selected this is purely how you start your re-toppo this just allows you to put down your first couple of polygons after that all of these other options become the same so this doesn't really matter too much which one you go with so let's start with probably the simplest of them let's start with vertex now all of these other options again don't worry about them too much we'll come back and go over most of these but this is just what's going to be added when we click this start read topo button so it's going to add a mirror modifier it's going to add a shrink wrap modifier and these are just some visual displays all of which can be tweaked as we go so let's just start by zooming in a little bit here because when you click this it is going to kind of lock down your camera to start with so let's just start kind of where we want to start so let's click start read topo and you can see now i've got this little cursor here which suggests that i can now place a vertex and you can see that it's snapping to my model quite nicely so let's start by just placing one somewhere around about here and in terms of starting that's that's kind of it from here we just go back to using all of our regular tools so if i zoom in a little bit here and just hit e to extrude and i'm just noticing that i don't have my screencasts on so let's make sure that that's on so you can all see what i'm doing go back to tools here there we go that's better so now when i hit e you can see that i can start extruding some of these points and i can use f to join all of those now at the moment this doesn't have a face this is just vertices and edges so i can tap a to select all and hit f and that has technically added a face there but you can't quite see it this is because of these display options here and this will depend on your own workflow personally i like to be able to see my faces so i'm going to tap hidden wireframe and now you can see that look at that we do in fact have a face there we just couldn't see it properly we'll come back to some of these in a little bit so now i can see things a little bit better and i can just use my extrude tools and just start kind of moving things around and at this point now that we've created this web basically back to all of our regular tools in terms of re-topology so that's not too bad that's our vertex tool i've just gone back into object mode you can see here it creates a new mesh this is our re-topology mesh anytime that you want to get back to your tools you just have to click on that mesh and go into edit mode and you can see that all of these come back up so you can kind of go off and if you want to do some modeling over here or whatever you can anytime come back to this go back into edit mode and continue with your read topology but let's delete this we can see we've once again got this selected object so this time let's try using the poly build so as we saw before i really didn't like the use hidden wire so i'm going to disable that one so that it won't create that visual setting when we first start our read topology so let's start again and you can see now that we're working with our poly build tool so this is going to be very very similar to our our first video if i now go in here and to create a vertex i need to hold down control and just click now poly build as a starting point is not great with this add-on because although that looks alright if we kind of zoom around here you can see that this vertex is actually just kind of hanging in space and that's because our poly build doesn't really obey our snapping until we've started to create a few things now it's not too difficult to fix we can just kind of go back to our front view here click and drag on that and you can see that now it's snapping correctly and from there we can start adding our points again and we can get things set up and again we've got all of our regular tools so i can either whoops i can either go back to my selection tool here and i can select both of those and hit f to create the edge or i can keep using the poly build and i can use the auto merge function to snap those when you enable speed retop o it automatically turns on your auto merge so that just saves you a little bit of extra time and it does also have options down here depending on how far you want your auto merge to automatically merge once again this hasn't created our face this is just edges and vertices so i can hold shift alt and select all of those or i should be able to just tap a and select all of them again hit f and you can see that now we get that face because we didn't have hidden wire on and from here it's once again we're now just into our retopology stuff so i can start clicking and dragging on our edges once again if you want some more detail on how to use the poly build tool our first lesson covers that in some pretty good detail so now that we've got this i can just very quickly start building stuff out and we're basically back to where we started so once again i'm going to go into object mode i'm going to delete our topology mesh here and this time let's show b surface because i think this is where the speed ray topo tool the add-on gets really powerful so once again make sure that hidden wire is disabled and i will go start re-topo now this time yes we still get all of our add-on modifiers and everything but if i click kind of nothing happens nothing seems to work i can hold down control and click and well in that fact this case it selects our body which if anything is even more annoying so now let's just go back to object mode reselect that go back into edit mode so how do we use this b surface stuff also worth mentioning that the b surface is kind of its own add-on you can see here that this is enabled now i believe that when you enable speedry topo it turns this on automatically if for some reason it starts throwing up errors and suggests that something is missing just double check that your b surface add-on is in fact turned on but like i say it should enable it by default so back to our retopology how do we go about creating stuff we need to know some of our b surface shortcuts and basically in our case that is going to be the d key so if you hold down d now goodness me that's kind of going bananas down there if you hold down d and then click and drag you can see that i can now start drawing little lines and this is where this starts to get really powerful so if i now come down here and draw another line i can go up here and click on the add b surface and you can see that it just automatically goes and adds this string of polygons which is really really fast down here we've got our options so we can decide how many cross edges that we want i think i'm going to go with four this is a little bit slow but once you've got it set up it's not too bad and you can also decide how many edges you want going across so i'm gonna go with four and two just to kind of get us started so what's really nice is that now i can come down here and once again hold down d and draw another line and if i hold down shift and alt and select this line of vertices or edges around here i can go add b surface and it automatically goes and adds all of these again in fact i'm just going to go and reduce our follow there just so i've got a little bit more control over this i just want to be able to draw one line and get one line of polygons just so i've got a little bit more control so that's really good that's really fast we can just kind of draw a line hold down d and go and add b surface and we can very quickly get these down but what's even cooler is you don't just have to do one line at a time so if i come down here now and draw several lines let's see how far down we can get this and now go up and uh shift alt select those edges and go add b surface you can see that it adds all of those all in one go so you can see just how fast this is going to get so let's just go and see how much of this chest we can get done here let's just draw a few more lines you can see i'm doing this really rough and really quick select all of those now you do also have the option of bringing up this menu here so you've got either this panel over here or you can shift right click and you get all of these options as well so you technically don't need to have this panel here which once you get used to this adam will allow you to work even faster now the one downside that i do kind of have with this add-on is shift right click is usually reserved for moving your 3d cursor around so if i just go under view here just rotate this around a little bit you can see i've got my 3d cursor there and i can kind of shift it around usually holding down shift and right clicking would move that around now broadly speaking i found that when i'm doing my re-topology i don't tend to use the 3d cursor i use it quite a bit for modeling and maybe animation but i don't think i've ever run into any problems where i've been like oh i really want to use my 3d cursor but this menu keeps popping up that's annoying generally speaking when i'm doing my read topology i turn on speedry topo in the add-ons and then when i'm moving onto animation or maybe i want to go back to modeling something i just disable it you also have the option of going into your um into your key mapping and your key binding and finding the um the shift right click and you you can go in and change these keyboard shortcuts so you can either set up your 3d cursor to work with something different or you can set up the speedry topo add-on to work with something different if you want it to be out have it enabled all the time personally i just enable it and disable it as i need it so let's go back to our read topology here go back into edit mode go back under tools so that we can see all of these again and you can see that it's kept their selection which is nice so if i now go shift right click and go add b surface you can see that it adds it right from there now just to prove a point here you don't have to do this an entire edge all in one go there's no reason that i couldn't come up here and let's just say select these two edges in fact let's just go down a little bit further and now i can use the d to draw in these lines reselect those and go add b surface and you see that it just extrudes from those i've still got my soft selection turned on here just move these around as i see fit so you can just move you can just extrude these couple of edges rather than having to do an entire an entire line in one go now just a couple of viewport things because this is kind of bugging me a little bit i don't like these default settings maybe you do feel free to keep using them i don't like this where i can see through my model and i can see my re-topology on the other side i find that to just be a bit visually confusing so you can turn off back face culling and you can see that gets rid of most of it i can still see my wireframe though so i can go and click in front and that that means that that's all pushed behind nothing's sorry this is kind of obscuring it but i do kind of like this sort of uh transparent look we've got so as much as i'm not a huge fan of these uh wireframes kind of sitting back over there i think i'd rather put up with that and have this uh this nice kind of um transparent wireframe sitting there i find it i find it really useful to be able to see all these kind of little lumps and bumps so that i can match my uh my retopology up to say these little lines in his chest whereas in if i have that set there i i can no longer see what i'm doing so these settings here are kind of my personal preference but feel free to just sort of play around with them and figure out what works best for you because that's going to differ from person to person now extruding these faces all the way down here has actually worked really really well for me oftentimes this won't work quite as perfectly so i'm actually going to just kind of come in here and delete a few of these faces and show you some of the ways that it can go wrong let's just kind of match this up a little bit better so let's go back to our drawing tool here and i'm going to just sort of offset this a little bit make sure that it's not quite in the center remember that you've got the mirror modifier on so generally speaking you'll want to try to draw it directly from the middle that's why it's worked really well this time but let's just say that you kind of offset this a little bit and just you know maybe didn't do a perfect job so let's go in and add our b surface and you can see now i've got this big gap where our re-topology hasn't worked properly now i can just come in and kind of do this manually and just sort of re-zip this section up but there is a built-in tool for that so let's go shift alt select everything down the middle line and go to our right click and if you go to align to x you can just see that it takes every single vertice that you've got selected and snaps it directly to the center so again this is just one of those really fast tools and you'll probably find yourself using it fairly frequently now you can probably also see here that i've kind of got this these polygons here are considerably bigger than say these ones all the way over here that's just it's not perfectly clean so again there's no reason you can't just sort of come in and do this manually but again why not use some of the built-in tools so let's select this entire edge along here let's bring up our menu again and let's just go space you can see that now kind of tries to space all of our vertices with about the same gap in between all of them so if i just kind of come through here i can kind of space these out just a little bit nicer now this tool the this spacing tool seems to work particularly well when you're just working with a one single edge going across so if for example let's come up here and maybe select you know a bunch of these edges so let me deselect those and if we try to do this now you can see that it doesn't do a particularly good job so i don't think it's really designed for working that way instead if you want to try to get a you know a big a big string of vertices like this you can go and use the relax tool now that won't have shifted too much because there's not too much to relax here but you can probably see that that just sort of shifts everything ever so slightly and just kind of smooths it all out a little bit now you do have to be a little careful using the relax tool in fact i can see that it's kind of done it there so this is going to smooth everything watch watch this particular line here at the moment i just hide that for a second it's lined up very nicely on this rigidis chest piece but if i now come in here and go relax you can see that it pops it out somewhat and now we'd have to go back and manually kind of readjust this so you do have to be a little bit careful with with using some of these automatic spacing and relaxing tools most of the time they work pretty well just be aware that sometimes they can you know sort of explode a little bit you'll possibly also notice then when i tried to move this vertices it's snapped it to the center that's just because of the size of my particular object and it's interacting with this mirror modifier over here our merge distance is just set a little bit too high so if i just come and set this to 0.01 instead and now i can move that without it doing that horrible snapping problem now speaking of kind of some weird snapping problems if you've been back and watched the first video you'll have noticed that there are times where our shrink wrap modifier kind of behaves a little bit strangely and our edges here kind of stop snapping in the way that we'd sort of expect them to and the only way to fix that is to just go in apply the shrink wrap modifier and recreate it and that's a little bit of a tedious process fortunately speed read topo has a really nice quick way of doing that so if i just bring up my right click menu again or shift right click you can see here we've got this is the section for our modifiers and you can see that i can enable and disable our mirror modifier i can do the same thing with our shrink wrap and there's a few different options like applying our mirror modifier in our case we kind of don't want to do that and as you can see when i undo that it doesn't actually recreate our mirror modifier which is a little bit annoying that's okay we also have an add mirror button up here to quickly bring it back so in terms of the shrink wrap modifier we've got this little arrow here this is our reset button basically so this will automatically apply our shrink wrap and then create a new one on top of it so if we just click that you can see that everything just shifts ever so slightly and that's because it's now reapplied everything and everything does shift ever so slightly when you do that but this should now be applied a little bit better uh and in our case it actually seems we've done a really really good job oftentimes it will apply the shrink wrap and just do not a perfect job so often times i will have to come in here and realign that to the x-axis but as i say it's done a good job this time now again what's really nice about using um speedry topo and all the different uh retopology creation methods is there's nothing that stops us from coming down here and continuing just to use our normal tools so i can come and select these edges and i can just kind of extrude them out a little bit further if i want i can go back to our poly build tool here and i can continue using that if i feel like it and you can see that's behaving just a little bit strangely there we go that's a little bit better i can also use ctrl r here if i want to add a few extra edge loops for whatever reason maybe i just want a little bit more geometry in there and that all works really really well so let's just extrude some extra edges over here so i can show you some of these other tools so one two three four one two let's just make sure we've got the same number of edges here and we do so this should work nicely okay so let's drag this across a little bit what we want to do now is bridge these areas so again you've got access to all of your normal tools you can just go bridge edge loop which is fine or you've also got that option under your shift right click menu and we can bridge from there you see this has done something a little bit weird here it's kind of flipped these over there's no reason you can't just come down here and go to your twist or tap the reverse and that fixes that so if you've got two different areas on your retopology that you want to join you can use the bridge tool as well as that we also have the grid fill option so let's just go and add another edge in there so that we've got the same number of edges on both sides and if i just go and shift alt click to select that ring around there again you can either go ctrl f to bring up your faces menu and you can go grid fill from there or once again this is built into the add-on with your shift right click and you can tap bridge um sorry not bridge we want to reselect those and we want to go grid fill and you can see that that now does it properly and you can also see that this is i mean it's it's filled in nicely but this is not necessarily cleaned apology you can see that this kind of comes down there and then goes off a bit of a weird angle so let's just select all of this area and go shift right click and let's go relax and you can see that in this case the automatic method has done a pretty good job so that covers our bridge grid fill spacing relax we also have this g stretch tool here now i believe that the way that this is supposed to work is if i was to uh let's grab our d brush again and let's just kind of make a bit of a zigzaggy line here and if i was to then select all of those edges if i was to use the g stretch thing here it's it's supposed to try and make this uh this string of edges follow our little squiggly line here but you can see that when i do that i mean it does shift it and it actually hasn't massively broken it for a change but you can see that it doesn't doesn't do a particularly good job and that's because unfortunately the g-stretch tool is not working in the latest version of blender i'm not sure whether they're planning on fixing that or whether this is now kind of a defunct feature this may not be coming back incidentally now that we've got this wiggly line here um how do we get rid of it you can see that if i just kind of try to undo it it doesn't disappear it goes back to whatever changes that we made in our topology what you need to do is hold down d and instead of left clicking to draw you just hold down right click and you can see that i now get this eraser tool and i can now come in and erase whatever we've got there if for example you were maybe trying to bring this string of polygons here down to the leg and you started drawing and you accidentally drew over the edge and then you tried to add a b surface you can see that it does some weird things it tries to reproject it onto the belly if you've accidentally done that you can just come in here hold down d and just kind of erase that back a little bit and then add the b surface and it fixes it so i think that takes care of all the various tools that are available in this add-on the last thing or second last thing that i want to show you is just a little technique which is getting a loop of polygons to go around a cylinder shape like this leg here if i use the d tool here you can see that there's no way to kind of wrap this around the leg you can see that it projects onto the leg and then goes off at a weird angle and trying to add that just sort of does some weird stuff let's just undo that the way that we fix this let's just give ourselves a little string of polygons to work with and instead this time let's just grab our drawing tool again and let's just draw a few lines around our leg and it broke on me hold on a second let's just erase that let's try that again hold down d and that should probably do okay so let's select these now and now that we've got these lines drawn around our leg if we go and add a b surface you can see that it now wraps all the way around and of course we can come in here bridge that last little bit and then just wiggle them around as we see fit or we could come in here and try doing a relax and we can also come in and add a few extra edge loops if we don't feel like we've quite got enough detail and i might just try and relax that again a little bit that's how you get polygons to go around objects and we can do the same sort of thing up here to get rings around say the eyes like we did with the leg let's come in here and just draw a few lines i like to try and just draw them a little bit further away from the actual eye socket just so we don't get any weird snapping where the vertices try to snap inside the head let's just draw a few of these now in this case we want to create a new mesh up here so don't select any edges down here and if we just go right shift right click and go add b surface we add a whole bunch of polygons now in this case i think we've got too many on the cross so let's just drop that down to one so we're just dealing with a few less polygons and you'll also notice that this now appears clear whereas in this down here is purple and if i flip around here you can see that it's purple on this side so for some reason and i'm not quite sure why it's doing it on my model but it's decided that it wants to flip these normals now sometimes you can just kind of go select all and go recalculate normals and it will fix it in our case it's not for some reason and i admit i'm not 100 sure why but it's a fairly easy fix this is why having these viewport display options is really nice because you can actually just look at this and immediately tell oh something's wrong what's wrong let's use the l key to just select that section and we can go alt n and under here we've got recalculate normals and a whole bunch of other normals options let's just flip that around you can see now that that's kind of turned that pinky purply color and is now working as expected let's just get this ring all the way around the eyes and just see whether any other problems occur with our normals so again holding down d let's just draw a couple more lines in here select that edge and go and add the b surface and you can see once again it's kind of done this weirdness where it's flipping things so again use l to select we can go recalculate normals in this case it still really feels like that should be the front it's being a little bit annoying so let's go alt n and flip them again and then just to make this easy let's just manually reconnect this last little bit i'm just going to go back down here to our body for a little bit i'm just going to go through and do a little bit of retopology work here just so we've got a little bit more um geometry to work with and then i'm going to show you how you can test to see whether the retopology you've done is working [Music] so clearly the retopology here isn't finished yet but it's finished enough that i can show you how to test it and make sure that it's working properly and you should probably be doing regular tests as you go along rather than finishing everything only to find out you've done something wrong near the end so now is probably a good time to run a quick little test while we've kind of got a good chunk of him done here now speed ray topo uses the subdivision modifier to uh to run its tests so that is the subdivision surface here which you're probably familiar with however if you're ultimately trying to bake either normal maps or displacement maps for uh animation or rendering later and you're looking to do your final exports like if your retopology was finished here you'd probably want to want to be using the multi-resolution modifier now i'm not going to go over how to do that in this particular tutorial i'm planning another one that will do a kind of step-by-step guide on how to use the multi-res how to extract normal and displacement maps so i'm not going to cover that just now but just keep in mind that if you're doing your final export probably use the multi-res but if we just go back into edit mode here this using the sub surf option here that comes with speedry topo is perfectly fine just for testing purposes so you can see we've either got the button there or if we bring up our menu we've got the add subsurface in here so i'm going to click that and you can see that it actually adds the subsurf in between our mirror and shrink wrap modifier which is where we want it so from here you can either drop back into object mode or you can just come here and click the little edit mode toggle here and that will show us our our final result while we're still in edit mode and you can see that at the moment our final result kind of looks a little bit weird some of these detailed areas look a little bit puffy a little bit inflated that's due to our shrink wrap modifier it's uh offset is just set a little bit too high so i'm just going to lower this i'll hold down shift and click and drag so that i can move it only tiny little increments increments and as you can see the closer we get that to the original surface the better and better it starts to look so i'm going to leave mine at .003 in this case and i think that's going to be close enough so at first glance this is good this seems to be working uh we are not we're not picking up quite as much detail as i would like if i just go and hide our main mesh here you can see i've kind of got these little uh scratches and stuff built into his armor and i'm not picking all of that up i'd really like to get all of that detail in there just to test and make sure that our geometry is is high enough that we can actually pick up all of these tiny little details so the way we do that is just go to our levels viewport and we just want to crank this up slightly now keep in mind that the higher you put this the more taxing it's going to be on your computer push it as high as you can you know without breaking your computer basically and you can see that once i hit level 4 we can start to pick up these details and that's probably high enough i will just push it to 5 and you can see that i get a little bit more detail out of that but there's not a big difference between four and five we just kind of get a little bit more contrast in there so i'll leave it at five because again this is just for testing purposes and you can see that this pretty much seems to be working i'm just going to do a little bit of a scout over the model and see if i can't pick up any defects and it seems to have worked pretty well even these little swirly things on his kneecaps have turned out pretty good and those are probably one of the hardest parts to get right with this process now one thing that you do want to do is just kind of go through the middle of your model that center point on the x-axis and just make sure that everything is lining up and i can see a tiny little glitch in here if we zoom right in something strange is going on here so let's just turn our subsurf off for a moment go back to toggle here i'm just going to isolate this by hitting the slash key and zoom back in and yes you can indeed see that we've got some vertices here that have at some point in the process crossed over and i haven't noticed so let's turn our sub surf back on in fact no i will leave that disabled because that many polygons may slow things down too much i'm just going to use the grab key and make sure that it snaps to the center again and turn back our sub surf toggle our wireframe off and now you can see that that has worked very nicely now as i said in the last lesson it can be tempting to try and uh obviously we're not finished with our retopology here you want to go back in and keep working on it it can be tempting to continue working with the subsurf modifier on because hey if i keep working with all of this selected i get all this extra detail as i work and i mean it can kind of work but you possibly notice there if i just undo as i start to extrude it i get this really weird glitchiness going on particularly if i do that so working with a sub surf modifier on gets really really tricky and tedious and difficult and you get all these little glitches that come through so i would strongly recommend deleting your subsurf either you can delete it here in your modifier stack or you can use the add-on to delete it up here and go back to your original low poly mesh and maybe just increase the offset a little bit more so it's easier to work and now you can go back to working and anytime that you want to retest it you can just go and add a subsurf again and crank that back up keeping in mind that you will probably still need to lower the offset so that's how you test whether or not your topology is working and that brings us to the end of this lesson now i'm planning one more video in this series and in that lesson we'll be covering the re-topo flow add-on ritopo flow is even more powerful than speedry toppo with the downside that it is a paid add-on now if you don't have a spare eighty six dollars speedry toppo is a fantastic free add-on but if you're looking to take your retopology to yet another level maybe you do read topology a lot or maybe you do it professionally and you're happy to sync that money in for a few extra nice features tune in in the next lesson where i'll give you a crash course on re-topoflow until then

Channel: Jamie Dunbar

Views: 40,354

Keywords: Blender, retopology, dragon, spyro, shrinkwrap, creature, tutorial, purple, Blender 2.9, remesh, topology, speed retopo

Id: 7_72QdYn31c

Length: 36min 36sec (2196 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020