New Silo topology tool coming soon
greentooth
http://www.silo3d.com/users/Feed/files/surfacetoolpreview.mov
Looks like they took the best parts of the NEX plugin/polyboost and Silo-fied it. Currently in beta, looking forward to this one. Retopologising is the most tedious part of my job, apart from Lodding and exporting.
Looks like they took the best parts of the NEX plugin/polyboost and Silo-fied it. Currently in beta, looking forward to this one. Retopologising is the most tedious part of my job, apart from Lodding and exporting.
Replies
Alex
So, this looks useful.
Anyone knows if it will be limited to quads only? That's like the huge drawback of Nex's Quaddraw for instance.
I always found Silo's retopo workflow quite slow, I am glad they had the guts to completely change it. Go go Silo!
Any suggestions besides Polycruncher I can use to decimate my models prior to import into Silo?
About Silo - what is your guys experience with their forums and the creator's reactivity to user suggestions? Last time I checked, the forums iwere mostly users talking amongst themselves with no answers from the devs, which I find a bit sad considering how powerful Silo could quickly become...
I dont normally import the highest subD from ZB, but...for the girl model I've posted recently I started from a glorified box and anything but the last 1-2 subdivisions its really chunky on the ears & mouth. Also, anything I've created using Mesh Extract can only be reduced so far and has the same issue...
Meshlab. It`s free andcan deal with more polygons than polycruncher in my experience. Very nice software.
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
Gwot, sounds like you're already in the beta...have they managed to keep it nice and simple to use as per usual?
just thought i'd give polyboost a mention in this thread. it's got some crazy tools.
As for retopology, can't wait to try it!
Silver & Gwot : my very own retopology chart would be from best to worse :
1 Topogun - 2 Polyboost - 3 Nex - 4 Old Silo Retopo.
Topogon is realy *that* good. It's the awkwardest at first but definitely the smartest retopo workflow in the end (for me!) I Didn't try the ZBrush3 tools tho but I expect them to be crashy and not solid enough, might be wrong!
The great thing about Topogun is not only its toolset but also its display behaviour. As opposed to retopo tools integrated in more complex programs (Max-Polyboost, Maya-Nex and I suspect the same for Silo) the scene display as been completely thought for retopo purposes. For instance you don't have to setup xray materials or fiddle with backfacing - everything is displayed for efficiency. Also even if the lowpoly and the highpoly clip, Topogun displays the lowpoly in priority no matter what, which makes for a very smooth experience. I hope Silo will do the same.
There is also an opensource program doing retopo only but I couldn't get it to work, or it crashed, can't remember. Can't remember it's name either hehe.
Pior: What is it about topogun that's so much better? I'll admit I didn't really understand what you meant about xray materials or backfacing. In Silo, you set the model's material to transparant (which is one of the options, like hard-shaded, soft-shaded, transparant...), and you can only snap to what you're looking at directly, basically. There's no easy way to snap an entire model to the highpoly in one go yet.
I should probably just try topogun, really.
The only advantage to Polyboost and Nex for me is the fact that I like doing everything in the least possible softwares.
On Zbrush topology, I'd never use it to make a final lowpoly model, but when working with very simple base mesh, it's pretty handy to create a new intermediate mesh once you've fleshed out the general shapes, and have a better grasp of where you need definition.
It's a bit strange at times (hey it's Zbrush, obviously) but fairly quick once you've gotten the hang of it, and it directly reprojects you're detail onto the new topology, so you can see right away if you have enough definition in the right areas, which is handy.
Obviously there's no reason to use it if you're not sculpting in Zbrush.
There is a MAJOR issue right now with retopo I've been facing, and it has to do with the very latest display drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA when it comes to consumer gaming cards. It seems that lately, OpenGL support for gaming cards has taken a serious hit on both companies, forcing you to exclusively work with GL cards. It's pretty much the reason why I can't use topogun anymore
One workaround I've found if you don't want to "drop" a level for retopo.(perhaps if you want to rebuild a "detailed" sub-d version of your mesh.) is to import in "chunks" and retopo a section at a time. I have a video of this I made on youtube:
[ame]
Podman, I am having big display issues also. I basically cannot use Nex at work because of a very weird ghosting effect that no one seemt to be able to get rid of(Nvidia card). However Topogun works fine so it's okay
with topogun v silo, topogun's conforming/snapping seems to work alot smoother than silo's(which imo is really the best part), can handle higher density meshes at faster speeds, and the creation of faces is a breeze.
One thing I really hope they introduce in the Silo retop workflow is a shrinkwrap method of surface constraint. This is one thing that is great with NEX. Create a cylinder with several divisions down it's length, roughly place over a limb and hit shrinkwrap and it'll conform around the mesh. Same thing happens with all the editing functions. As it stands in Silo if you accidentally select a backfacing vert while using the Pen tool it drags your backfacing vert to the side facing the camera.. and a pretty nasty bug won't let you undo this monumental blunder.
I'm also not a huge fan of the Topogun workflow as the tools don't quite work in harmony. The SimpleEdit, SimpleCreate and Bridge tools should be merged to one tool with sticky keys in my humble opinion. The workflow as it's implemented at the moment feels quite disjointed compared to NEX.
The Bridge tool in Topogun also seems to create more artifacts than QuadDraw and going back and forth creating and deleting faces isn't as streamlined. Faces and Edges seem severed from each other and you discover after deleting a bunch of faces that you must also go in and delete the edge cage. It seems a pretty messy workflow. Someone correct me if there is a way of turning this off.
On the plus side Topogun can handle most hires meshes I throw at it with very little viewport slowdown and as Pior mentioned has a cleaner way of displaying the Reference and Lowres meshes.
I agree about the modes in need of being streamlined! I love how you can jump from create to select mode by just pressing right click, but I hope that I could also reach bridge mode with that.
I don't know yet if the the Topogn guy is willing to change/enhance his app, we shall see soon I guess!
It's actually the topogun "gal".
Pior, the NEX people are aware of the Nvidia bug, it's a nasty one and it's related to OpenGL. Right now, Max has the upper hand when it comes to "realtime" viewport feedback. If only we can render Maya with Direct3d.
Yes, it's true in the video post, you've got to set up your retopo workflow material parameters to make the topology visible and in Topogun, you "reference" the mesh.
Ghib, creating primitives and using the "shrink wrap" I use ALL the time. It's great! I call it "box modeling in reverse". Exploiting primitives to rebuild meshes saves a ton of time. A lot of you polycounters use "cylindrical" style modeling anyways, so it's very logical and sure beats poly by poly by poly by poly.
Cheers for the Heads up - works on mac too.
The new Silo tools are working really well, and I hope they release a video of the updated UV tools soon too since they have come on leaps and bounds.
Incidentally, do you Outerlight guys smoke on the roof? I saw someone up there about 15 minutes ago.