Best auto-retopology tool?

Jonathan85

Hello

Whats the current best automatic retopology tool/feature in some software?

Im currently using automatic retopology in Zbrush. I also use the decimation master in zbrush (all Zbrush 4R6)

Is there any tool that automatically produces better results then Zbrush 4R6? (a lot softwwares (like Mod for exampel etc.) have automatic retopology tools so i guess there must be one that has the best results...?

OccultMonk

I think it depends on whether you want to retopo organic or Hard surface objects. Organic retopology works very well in ZB 4R6 and somewhat different/worse in ZB 4R7. For Hard surface retopo there does not seem to be a very good solution at the moment. You could use some tools in ZBrush like creases and polygroups to define hard edges before you auto-retopology.

CharacterCarl

I've found the ZRemesher from ZBrush to be the most reliable solution so far. 4R7 works fine for me. For hard surface, I've heard 3DCoat has autopo for hard surface. Don't know how it compares though. MODO has had automatic retopology introduced in 10.2 and, so far, it didn't quite stack up against ZRemesher judging only from my tests (more triangles, looked a bit more like a DynaMesh) but they've improved it in 11.0 which I still need to try out.
That said, I usually wouldn't use automatic topology for most final game-ready assets (except things like rocks, etc.) let alone animation-ready character topology. Especially for hard surface it usually introduces a lot of superfluous loops and is quicker to do by hand.

FildoSaggins

I would agree with @OccultMonk in that it depends on the nature of the object. I work in medical/scientific animation so for most of the organic stuff I do ZRemesher works great, but is by no means "automatic" for everything. I haven't tried 3D Coat or the new Modo retop but my opinion is that it's prob best to do some things by hand, especially for characters that need to deform cleanly. If you wanna preserve your sanity and avoid manual retop in ZBrush, tools like Maya's Quad Draw and Topogun might be worth looking into.

ez5k

up..

just curious if anything changed radically since 2017?

Juggernaut1994

Well... I used to use maya quad-tool, my first love in maya, but laggy even on medium meshes (lags from 70K+) so I had to find replacement.
Blender's plugin Retopoflow for me is the best solution these days, no matter what retopology required, organic or hard-surf. Tools are easy to use, very flexible and they're working together very seamlessly

musashidan

No. Zremesher 3.0 released but only updated hardsurface retop. Organic algorithm remains unchanged.

ez5k

Cool, thank you! Will check both. Interested mostly in retopolgy for hardsurface parts.

knacki

Don't now other solutions than zRemesher. Zbrush, as always, is not straight forward.

I pretty much like Polyjunkies approach in combining zBrush tools for best retopo result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgVtbl__ZGE

Alex_J

Juggernaut1994 said:

Well... I used to use maya quad-tool, my first love in maya, but laggy even on medium meshes (lags from 70K+) so I had to find replacement.
Blender's plugin Retopoflow for me is the best solution these days, no matter what retopology required, organic or hard-surf. Tools are easy to use, very flexible and they're working together very seamlessly

Little bit OT,  but I see this same complaint all over. There is a good solution. You'll get best performance from quad draw by keeping the amount of quads connected to the new mesh you are building less than 5k. So every once in awhile, simply extract the faces you've built. You can easily merge border edges when finished. This keeps quad draw running smooth even if you are building over a mesh with a million tri's.