And remember to use the Smooth tool of Slide Relax in the sculpt mode. This will help you to improve the flow of your retopology, without modifying the shape of the mesh. (Use Slide Relax with Shift pressed, and wireframe turned on)
Now I hope they get to maya 2024 level retopology. It's literally magic, I was blown away by the auto retopology. it is literally a 1 click solution to 90% of all topology problems.
hey! Im recently trying to get into the whole retopology thing and while i am starting to get the hang of it i havent so far come across this. How do you go about enabling such an overlay?
Face Nearest has been there for a very long time. Retopoflow has been using that option by default for a long time. There's absolutely nothing new here ;)
I had to check to confirm, since I knew the list wasn't *exactly* the same and I knew some of the stuff now worked differently. Before, there was only: -Face Project (Works like current "Face", snapping only the last selected to the surface) -Face Nearest (Works like in video) Now, there is: -Face (Works like old "Face Project", snapping only the last selected to the surface) And in a separate list "For Individual Elements" below... -Face Project (Works like in video, but projected from camera angle) -Face Nearest (Works like in video)
Now if only instead of creating sub-par images someone would repurpose AI to tackle retopology altogether, that would be a use of AI I'd support 500%. Retopology is so tedious and few things come close to it when it comes to killing the enjoyment of creating 3D stuff.
MeshAnything: Artist-Created Mesh Generation with Autoregressive Transformers, Chen et al at Shanghai AI Lab, published a few weeks ago. Source code is supplied. Takes 8GB of memory to mesh up to 1600 faces, which is... not a lot! But it looks promising.
Pretty sure that already exists, I saw a video about exactly that recently. I'm glad to have AI do the tedious work for me that allows me to be more creative - instead of doing the creative work for me so I just have to do the tedious stuff.
I was retopologizing a tree yesterday in blender 3.8 wondering why this wasnt a feature already, so glad they decided to add this in. This alone is worth the upgrade
I never had to do any retopology so far, I always modeled my characters by hand. Which to some degree, is quite a pain because it's complicated and takes forever. With my next character, I should try to convert what everybody does, sculpting then retopologizing. Is probably still less work than how I modeled my characters so far.
I rarely need retopo at all, but when I do I say a prayer for all you character artists out there, cause it is INFURIATING. Would never want to go back to Maya, but QuadDraw was already leagues ahead of Blender ten years ago go, when I started. Hope they will match that someday.
Blender 3.6 (and I believe earlier versions too, don't know how far it goes though) has that option, but it's a seperate snap tool instead of an option for vertex/edge snaping.
Instead of a cylinder try using a curve. You can adjust each point in the curve to fit the arm more closely and then when it shrinkwraps it's much less messy.
This has been a thing for years lol I remember being confused and having to figure out whether to click Face Project or Face Nearest the first time I ever made something with the snapping tools.
Can't imagine using any other program to retopolize at this point. Between this and the Bsurface addon I'm pretty sure Blender is well ahead of every other 3d Software for this task.
Shrinkwrap for an circle or an poly strip... Thats all. Thanks for the intro 4 newbes... but blender was top of the notch already its tools. non parametric, but fu****n fast in building things
I used to use 3ds max for over 10 years before I switched the blender and I'm still frustrated with all of these lacking features. It's funny finally to see some of these basic functions to be added to blender after 10 years when 3ds Max had it from version 1
Hi grant! Love your videos. Just finished a few of your courses on gamedev. I was just wondering I'd you had any resources (or could direct me to some) on workload from blender to unreal 5? Thanks very much
What is retopology? Is it only used when rigging a character for animations? Or does it just add more geometry? I thought adding more poly or geometry to a character and into a game adds more data to the game.
I see this feature a while ago when i see someone on youtube using this when retopology. Then i tried and yes this tools make retopology feels much easier.
I'm a bit confused, "face nearest" is an option in the 3.3 LTS. Is this different from the one in the video? I tested it with a circle on a cylinder and it worked similarly
Hello, unfortunately, it’s not working properly for me. It starts with the vertex staying in place and not continuing along the surface when I extrude, and sometimes it works fine. What could be the problem? I'm still new to Blender and trying to fix the issue. Thanks for reading!
@@grabbitt But seriously, bsurface is worth getting used to. I'm sure you know but with it you can easily control the topology. For instance, in this example you showed you end up with a cylindrical shape, but often you will want topology that allows for good customization later. Something that conforms to the biceps, elbow, etc, in such a way that you can change their shape and size without trouble. BSurface makes that very natural, particularly combined with shrinkwrap and maybe a subdivision modifier.
@@grabbitt hmm yeah that technically works. I'm just hoping for the similar functionality that retopoFlow has where you can pull vertices around and they stay snapped. The only problem with doing it using the modifier is if you get too far things are going to start to get fucky. I wonder if it's possible with some geometry nodes set up. I feel like this could also just be an option in sculpt mode where each brush would have a snapping option.
Shrinkwrap is still dependent on the original vertex position in order to accurately raycast to the nearest surface, so you want snapping to ensure that the two are in sync with each other, otherwise the mismatch can make things increasingly awkward and unintuitive as time goes on. Plus you can offset the shrinkage.
In fairness, retopoflow made retopology ridiculously easy already and is open sourced (not for commercial use but still). This is a great addition to Blender's snapping tools tho
@@grabbitt you said "I don't think anything like this was available previous to 4.0" and kept calling it the new snapping system. I went back and looked but I really couldn't find the part of the video where you mentioned this not being a new feature. Maybe I just missed it
And remember to use the Smooth tool of Slide Relax in the sculpt mode. This will help you to improve the flow of your retopology, without modifying the shape of the mesh. (Use Slide Relax with Shift pressed, and wireframe turned on)
This video and this comment are enormously helpful.
OMG FINALLY!!! That's the best blender update since 2.8
So basically what retopoflow does, but without as many of its bells and whistles. That's a huge upgrade, honestly.
This was definitely an issue I came across a lot when topologising. Thanks for highlighting this new feature Grant, incredibly useful!
Now I hope they get to maya 2024 level retopology. It's literally magic, I was blown away by the auto retopology. it is literally a 1 click solution to 90% of all topology problems.
@rocker10039 is maya free yet?
@@SpiritKingD it is not free, you could check for yourself with a quick google search.
@@SpiritKingD no and you could find that out yourself with a simple search on the internet
@@SpiritKingD idk why my replies keep getting deleted but it's not free and you could've looked it up.
@@rocker10039 I know, but some friendly interaction with a fellow in the same hobby/career can be nice. Thank you for replying buddy!
Don't forget about Retopology shading in Mesh Edit Mode Overlays, sometimes it's much more convient.
hey! Im recently trying to get into the whole retopology thing and while i am starting to get the hang of it i havent so far come across this. How do you go about enabling such an overlay?
@@killer8217gaming you can find in the Mesh Edit Mode (only appear in Edit Mode), right to the Overlays Icon.
Always the biggest thanks to you Grant! You're the best
Face Nearest has been there for a very long time. Retopoflow has been using that option by default for a long time. There's absolutely nothing new here ;)
I downloaded 3.3 LTS and it was there lol
I didn’t know about it and appreciate the video a lot.
I had to check to confirm, since I knew the list wasn't *exactly* the same and I knew some of the stuff now worked differently.
Before, there was only:
-Face Project (Works like current "Face", snapping only the last selected to the surface)
-Face Nearest (Works like in video)
Now, there is:
-Face (Works like old "Face Project", snapping only the last selected to the surface)
And in a separate list "For Individual Elements" below...
-Face Project (Works like in video, but projected from camera angle)
-Face Nearest (Works like in video)
@@TeamMuggioh hey muggi, fancy seeing you here
@@HanSolocambo but you have to go into the retopoflow environment to do that
Face nearest existed for more than a year
well now more people know about it
I literally just found out about this AFTER retoping a complex model, this works so well!
Awesome tip as always, short, clear and perfectly explained. 😄
Ahh, short and informative video! A breath of fresh air! 😁
Thank you Grant for everything you're doing! 👍
Now if only instead of creating sub-par images someone would repurpose AI to tackle retopology altogether, that would be a use of AI I'd support 500%. Retopology is so tedious and few things come close to it when it comes to killing the enjoyment of creating 3D stuff.
Completely agree
MeshAnything: Artist-Created Mesh Generation with Autoregressive Transformers, Chen et al at Shanghai AI Lab, published a few weeks ago. Source code is supplied. Takes 8GB of memory to mesh up to 1600 faces, which is... not a lot! But it looks promising.
They're hardly subpar anymore for better or worse
I think I'm one of those 1/1000 weirdos who find retopo kind of therapeutic, but yea ,massive time sink for sure.
Pretty sure that already exists, I saw a video about exactly that recently. I'm glad to have AI do the tedious work for me that allows me to be more creative - instead of doing the creative work for me so I just have to do the tedious stuff.
This is awesome! Thank you! With snapping getting more useful, now I hope knife and extrude will aswell.
That is a huuuuge improvement! Thanks for the heads up 👍
Wow! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Great Tip Grant.
This is wonderful to know. Thanks for sharing!
Man, face project has caused me so many headaches. Thanks for the tip!
Oh that does make it easier!! Good, BC I got into nomad sculpt but I want to after retopo them and was dreading it using blender lol.
I was retopologizing a tree yesterday in blender 3.8 wondering why this wasnt a feature already, so glad they decided to add this in. This alone is worth the upgrade
Honestly this is the most grueling part. I’m glad they added this and thx for sharing it
I never had to do any retopology so far, I always modeled my characters by hand. Which to some degree, is quite a pain because it's complicated and takes forever. With my next character, I should try to convert what everybody does, sculpting then retopologizing. Is probably still less work than how I modeled my characters so far.
Had no idea this was possible! I was still manually snapping in 4.2 before this video. Thank you!
This is a huge tip!
I hate re-topology because I always mess up not thinking in 3d all the time.
wdym not thinking in 3d
that always made retopologizing a nightmare for me, thanks for pointing this out!
NICE! I missed that one. Thanks for sharing!
Nice find, I didn't know about this before. Thank you!
Super useful as usual. Thanks Grant!
oh my god. thanks grant abitt. really needed this
Incredibly useful, thanks
I rarely need retopo at all, but when I do I say a prayer for all you character artists out there, cause it is INFURIATING.
Would never want to go back to Maya, but QuadDraw was already leagues ahead of Blender ten years ago go, when I started. Hope they will match that someday.
There is a quad draw plugin for Blender which works almost exactly like what Maya had.
PolyQuilt
Thank you very much... there should be a Blender category for the Nobel prize. You could be a candidate this year for this tip.
Amazing. I do so much retopology and this will really help
Blender 3.6 (and I believe earlier versions too, don't know how far it goes though) has that option, but it's a seperate snap tool instead of an option for vertex/edge snaping.
HUGE quality of life upgrade
What the hell, I used to spend hours upon hours on this, this can be 80% faster. Thanks Grant!
I got the retopo add on for free during the Blendermarket sale so been using that
Awesome trick!! Thank you Grant!!
IMO the shrinkwrap is still better if you set it to 'Project'
Well this makes my life significantly easier, thank you.
I have struggled to understand for ages what those two snapping features do! Finally! Grant, you're the man!
Instead of a cylinder try using a curve. You can adjust each point in the curve to fit the arm more closely and then when it shrinkwraps it's much less messy.
Super merci !
This has been a thing for years lol
I remember being confused and having to figure out whether to click Face Project or Face Nearest the first time I ever made something with the snapping tools.
Surprised you didn't bring up the new retopology shading mode as well.
The what!?
@@TamerBayouq There's a retopology overlay. It's been there since like 3.6, I think. It's in the Viewport Overlays dropdown.
Ooh! That's fire!
A nice improvement
Thanks for this video, i hate when it snaps every vertice to the front parts
Can't imagine using any other program to retopolize at this point. Between this and the Bsurface addon I'm pretty sure Blender is well ahead of every other 3d Software for this task.
Thank you Grant!
Awesome Short Tut
Now more video of sculpting from you please ❤
This is huge!
Always a worth tip!
Shrinkwrap for an circle or an poly strip... Thats all. Thanks for the intro 4 newbes... but blender was top of the notch already its tools. non parametric, but fu****n fast in building things
This Dude is Amazing ! GJ
nice discovery. thanks!
Thanks for sharing!
thank you
thanks
I used to use 3ds max for over 10 years before I switched the blender and I'm still frustrated with all of these lacking features. It's funny finally to see some of these basic functions to be added to blender after 10 years when 3ds Max had it from version 1
Thank you for pointing out this gold nugget in the pot of candies :P
Awesome 👍👍
Super cool!
Thats why i became an environment artist instead of a character artist
I just decimate my rock sculpt and i have my low poly haha
Thanks for the tip
Thx Grant!
What??? This is HUUUGE!! 🤯
Great video Grant, please can I be cheeky and ask for help on a model I'm trying to retopologize? I'm so so stuck.
Hi grant! Love your videos. Just finished a few of your courses on gamedev.
I was just wondering I'd you had any resources (or could direct me to some) on workload from blender to unreal 5? Thanks very much
Not yet but looking into it
@@grabbitt awesome! It would be super helpful! Thanks for the reply man
00:30 is it a little bit or 10x easier? Make up your mind!
Yes 10 x is a little 100x is a lot.
cool thanks for the video!
dope, dude
I'm 3.6 user and it was available
Must have been introduced in blender 4 then
also, looptools->space
Thcnx ❣️
Thank god
Such an icredibly simple yet elegant solution 😮
a video about hip/pelvis/upper leg retopo loops and good deformation topology would be amazing
Hey grant can you make a tutorial about ucupaint addon of blender or is it any good for texture painting?
I'll try an take a look at some point
What is retopology? Is it only used when rigging a character for animations? Or does it just add more geometry? I thought adding more poly or geometry to a character and into a game adds more data to the game.
It's about reducing the amount of polygons
I see this feature a while ago when i see someone on youtube using this when retopology. Then i tried and yes this tools make retopology feels much easier.
Great
I just tried to continue to the next video like it was udemy lol
Nice
I'm a bit confused, "face nearest" is an option in the 3.3 LTS. Is this different from the one in the video? I tested it with a circle on a cylinder and it worked similarly
Yes like I said it's been around for a while but the interface has changed so made sense to do another video to clear stuff up
OMG thank you so mucchh for this vid man!!
Hello, unfortunately, it’s not working properly for me. It starts with the vertex staying in place and not continuing along the surface when I extrude, and sometimes it works fine.
What could be the problem? I'm still new to Blender and trying to fix the issue. Thanks for reading!
Very tricky to say unfortunately
This can be done in 10 seconds or less with RetopoFlow
Wait until he learns about the B-Surface addon....
I always found that a little bit awkward to use. But yes it can be useful
@@grabbitt But seriously, bsurface is worth getting used to. I'm sure you know but with it you can easily control the topology. For instance, in this example you showed you end up with a cylindrical shape, but often you will want topology that allows for good customization later. Something that conforms to the biceps, elbow, etc, in such a way that you can change their shape and size without trouble. BSurface makes that very natural, particularly combined with shrinkwrap and maybe a subdivision modifier.
Hi Grant, have you used b-surface add-on before? I would love to see a video on that for retopology
Yes I have. I found it a little awkward though
I've found PoyQuilt to be a lot better instead (also Free). Does take a bit to get used to, but is amazingly efficient for retopology.
mine ends up just snapping to its own vertices
O__O thx for the tip!
i wish they could leave old eevee on 4.2
Ho i need to test that.
Can I move these vertices around in sculpt mode and still have them stay snapped to the underlying mesh?
To a degree yes with the shrink wrap modifier
@@grabbitt hmm yeah that technically works. I'm just hoping for the similar functionality that retopoFlow has where you can pull vertices around and they stay snapped. The only problem with doing it using the modifier is if you get too far things are going to start to get fucky. I wonder if it's possible with some geometry nodes set up. I feel like this could also just be an option in sculpt mode where each brush would have a snapping option.
If you need the shrinkwrap anyways, what's the point of using the snap?
Shrinkwrap is still dependent on the original vertex position in order to accurately raycast to the nearest surface, so you want snapping to ensure that the two are in sync with each other, otherwise the mismatch can make things increasingly awkward and unintuitive as time goes on. Plus you can offset the shrinkage.
You can't use shrinkwrap (or any modifier) for shape keys
@@Arjjacks Nah, I think watching Grant's rigid body tutorial is a good way to deal with the shrinkage.
In fairness, retopoflow made retopology ridiculously easy already and is open sourced (not for commercial use but still). This is a great addition to Blender's snapping tools tho
Yes but that is the easiest place for retopo, the fun goes in other parts
Im sorry but this isnt a new feature, I use this in 3.6 too! You just never noticed it I guess haha
Which is what I said in the tutorial
@@grabbitt you said "I don't think anything like this was available previous to 4.0" and kept calling it the new snapping system. I went back and looked but I really couldn't find the part of the video where you mentioned this not being a new feature. Maybe I just missed it