Re-topology tools

TSM

I work in 3Ds Max 2k9, and it's getting very time consuming to build a low res mesh using the standard poly tools that are provided.

I downloaded PolyBoost, and it looks extremely powerful. Having watched all the movies, read the documentation, and forum surfed, I still cannot grasp why half of the tools are even useful; and the main purpose was to speed up retopo.

The 'retopo' part of Polyboost doesn't make much sense to me ... I draw a bunch of lines on the high res and it creates polys, cool - but for me, I get terrible results. I could only ever find this useful for terrain work.

I have also looked into other modeling suites just for the sake of retopo - I do a lot of hard edge work so not sure Zbrush would be a great candadit.

In one sentence: Using 3ds max, what's the fastest way to re-topo a lot of hard edge stuff? Is there software designed specifically for re-topo?

Thanks!

Rob Galanakis

Topogun.

nreynolds

in polyboost use the border tool, thats the best tool to retopo fast. its under modeling - polydraw (button)

new window pops up.

1. under "draw on" click surface.
2. create a poly plane somewhere (keep selected)
3. top button - "pick" your high poly
4. hit border button under edit.
5. start draging edges of taht created poly onto your high poly.

all the ways to use the border tool are under the like "i" button to the right of the border button.

pior

Hi!
Most retopo programs let you 'draw' lines on the surface of a reference mesh that got turned into polygons, but this is mostly useless. Better use a border/drag workflow.

Topogun
Zbrush
Silo
3DCoat
Gsculpt
Blender

all have dedicated retopo tools.

It also seems like MeshLab has a retopo plugin, but I ner tried it. Never tried Blender for that either.

solar

Polyboost is incredibly fast for retopology, like nreynolds says, use the border tool. I usually build one face first using the build tool (left click 4 times to create corner verts then holding shift click and drag from one corner to the other to create face) then its border tool from then on.

There have been several threads that have popped up in this forum over the last few days all asking very different questions about the best way to do things in max.(here and here)..polyboost has come up nearly everytime. It may have a lot of features you don't need (yet) but its worth the investment.

East

pior wrote: »

Most retopo programs let you 'draw' lines on the surface of a reference mesh that got turned into polygons, but this is mostly useless. Better use a border/drag work flow. [...]

I somewhat agree with you on this one, pior. Most of the time you don't want to use this feature, but there's situations when being able to quickly draw a topology onto a mesh as a quick block-out is very handy

For retopology I wholeheartedly recommend Silo, but you should try a few of the software packages out yourself and see which one suits you best.

TSM

Thanks for the responses guys! I got into TopoGun beta so I'm excited.

pior

Hehe East I hear you I think topology 'drawing' slowly got on my nerves because of it's implementation being a little broken in quite a few cases. I remember having difficulties connecting such created grids (can't remember if it was in Silo or PB...) and I slowly got less excited about it.

As a matter of fact I think there is a great, simple alternative : painting the desired topo using a 3d painting app, the blindly creating that planned out geometry later on.

I would love TG or any other contender to implement a simple black and white polygon painting tool (think pixelated pencil in photoshop) to let the user define the flow. Then the program would understand where intersections have been painted, and create the geometry from them at the push of a button...

East

pior wrote: »

I would love TG or any other contender to implement a simple black and white polygon painting tool (think pixelated pencil in photoshop) to let the user define the flow. Then the program would understand where intersections have been painted, and create the geometry from them at the push of a button...

I think that's exactly how Silo does it. I haven't used it in a while (so much for me finding it useful :poly124:) so I can't remember exactly. To be fair, until I looked at this thread I had forgotten it even existed, but I'm about to enter the retopology stage on a character I'm building so I'll give it a shot again and see if it's actually as useful as I say it is hehe

As for TopoGun, is that one still in development?

Snowfly

Yeah that's how Silo does it in theory, but the intersection detection's too sensitive; every intersection is turned into an edge. And it's unwieldy trying to sketch in the topo for an entire model, you're better off retopologizing in patches and bridging them together.

Blender's topo tools aren't too bad either, they remind me of polyboost's.

Personally I prefer planning out topo in Zbrush using poly paint, and going over the lines I've sketched in with the retopo tools.