First, to head off the fans in the thread, I think the tool is pretty good for what it does. Little things like using the current vertex selection to set the number of spans for a new cylinder retopo, the safety code to ensure the cylinder loops only go around the leg/tail/arm/whatever (instead of simply projecting from the opposite direction), etc have all the makings of a very useful tool when it’s done.
That said, the advantages of the tool are not really that well demonstrated in the video presented. Cylinder retopo is not really the hard / time-consuming part of the task and the video simply highlights that by how long it takes for everything else. Once the proposed “poly strips” tool makes it in, I reckon the demonstration will really highlight the benefits of the tool but, as it stands now, it comes across as more of a “how to retopo using Blender” video than a demonstration of Contours improving the workflow.
With that said, I’ll drop a few bucks on it tonight when I’ve got the credit card details handy
I want to know what everyone else’s method if for cylinders that this isn’t a huge time saver. In Blender at least cylinders have always been as much of a pain for me as anything else due to the inability to automatically project onto back faces.
Improving tools for retopology is always welcome,but cylinder retopo it’s not really important,a leg or an arm it’s not a cylinder.
At some time I hope someone starts to think about some hybrid polygon/patch modelling(bezier or other mathematical parametric representation)modelling,where with some curves you define the loops and glue patches together,with the control on how they get tessellated individually(generating only quad).
For me retopo should be in the future a more abstract/high level way of modelling,you have to think only about extraordinary points,not about the individual polygon faces.
Hey Philippe,
I was in the process of testing your bug and was like…I need to make a quick demo of the guide drawing. I popped your homepage and the link you provided into the info on the youtube video.
no probs.I wouldn’t call it well articulated bhahaha.
The confusion is in the terminology,I think.
In the situation I talked about,I think this is actually more like a manual remesher,than retopology tool (which implies you are changing the flow of topology)I find jonathans presentation bad, in that sense,for the fact that he is using a multires mesh to demonstrate.
To simplify,this feels like taking a cylinder primitive,with no caps,sculpting in mutlires,and then retopo.Can you see how that makes no sense at all? the information is already at basemesh level.The end result would be exactly like the basemesh.
I suppose by itself,I don’t think contours can truly be called a retopology tool,and if this was inspired by other software,I don’t think they should even be calling it a retopo tool either.The other proposals however,can,because then we are talking about flow.
but then the new zbrush tool is called zremesher instead of zretopo or something,and you see, all the terminology its getting confusing and makes me want to cry.haha.
I truly think there needs to be some kind of distinction,though.Anyway,let me get back to making art ,so that I can actually use these tools on something if you guys reach your goal
Contours like tool exist in 3dcoat, years now. After all, 3dcoat is a famous retopo tool. Not because of the contours though. 3DC provides a good visualization as you’re performning retopo and lot of really handy tools, bsurface like and many other beauties.
Pixologic named their auto-retopo tool as zremesher. They tried to avoid z retopo. After all, ZB has a manual retopo environment, years now (if this is truly workable is another matter of discussion)
Just saying. Because I can’t follow expressions like “what black magic is this? or WOW”. (such expressions followed the feature of the zremesher in zbrush. Still many are uncertain, how good this tool may be, I don’t blame them.)
A big warm thank you to the developers of this tool should be enough.
And, a donation to their efforts for a better blender. It is never too late.
You are one of the best sculptors on this forum, but I have not really seen enough variety in your work to know if you work in low-poly assets or not. I’m guessing no, because if you did, you’d clearly see the reason for our excitement.
Perhaps I’m overly-excited about this tool (not afraid to admit that), but it is simple reality that auto-retopo methods are for animation-grade detail models, not game models that are typically optimized to the triangle. This is where you want a more hands-on method that has traditionally been somewhat painful in Blender. Zremesher can’t fill that niche as well as I would like for the price of Z-brush.
This is as wow-worthy as any feature that has come out since dynatopo.
Will this bring you back to blender from Z-brush? Probably not! I can only speak for myself, and I work with game assets, not static models. Give us the ability to edit vertex normals in real time and we’re really in business here!
If Jonathan had used contours on a dynatopo mesh, you’d have nothing to say. I doubt anyone was really confused on the functionality due to that. I do agree that the video did more to make me want poly-patches than actually demonstrate the use of the tool as-is.
Wow, thanks for the mention!
Maybe just for “legal” clarity, you could add a line just above the HAL/supercell video link about the model originally being from said video.
…but, that’s probably just me nitpicking
but I have not really seen enough variety in your work to know if you work in low-poly assets or not. I’m guessing no, because if you did, you’d clearly see the reason for our excitement.
Sorry, You are guessing wrong.
Because there are many reasons to perform retopology, more than one.
Different topology is required for multires modifier/sculpting needs, different for game engines, different for animating.
On the other hand, render engines like cycles won’t render game assets well, no way.
So, it depends on our needs. A retopology workaround should be capable to serve all these needs. Right?
Will this bring you back to blender from Z-brush? Probably not!
This probably isn’t a question to me. If it is, wrong question.
3.
Funny, I also mentioned 3dcoat. If you haven’t try it, please do.
It will bring me back to blender? From where? From 3dcoat and zbrush? I don’t understand.
It will bring me back to BA forum? Here I am, though this may be a good question.
Keep the wows, the fanboysm. I’m not impressed.
Actually, after so many blender years, someone asks money to start working on a better blender. This is impressive.
It reminds me the other super project, the b surfaces. It changed blender, for sure.
I have to respectfully disagree with you there. If anything your point that the retopo of the arms didn’t take much time in the video supports how great this tool actually is. I’m pretty sure that if he didn’t use the tool, we would have been sitting there watching him place, poly by poly, all the edge loops in the arm and it would have been just as tedious as watching the rest of the process. Even if all he did was to extrude a few loop down the length of the arm, he would have to get the points to snap back onto the surface. And, I know from experience that you can’t do this very easily because the snapping in Blender is a simple view projection so the points that are behind the arm will jump to the front if you are not careful. So a lot of the times you end up having to go in and touch each vertex anyway.
Actually, I do a lot of retopo work now a days and arms and legs are, to me, the least interesting and probably the most annoying part of the process. Mainly because you can’t really see the underside of the model as you are going and you have to keep rotating your view and getting into small tight spaces in the arm pits or between the legs and fingers etc. In contrast, when you are doing the face or chest, you can just sit there and figure out the process with little distraction. I think they are equally difficult tasks to perform but this video shows that now, doing the arms is no longer part of the tedium.
You just nailed one of my key reasons for designing Contours this way. By expediting the mundane parts of retopology it allows you to better focus on the really crucial, and more difficult parts.
As others have said, you could just use shrinkwrap for the arms but in my experience this workflow is very finicky and far from perfect.
Contours does not provide any kind of new functionality that was already available in some way, but it does offer a much faster workflow with less workarounds.
I’m in the camp that see’s this as useful, convenient but not really all that amazing. I think some are making a bigger deal out of it than it warrants. What is more impressive is that this kind of development is happening with Blender, not so much what it is doing. A tool like this is limited, the kind of topology you are given may not be ideal for non static meshes. I think ultimately what people should be excited about is that this kind of development is occurring to begin with and where it may lead. If these tools continue to get better, it can even attract users of other apps and those wanting to see it in a professional pipeline, but as of right now this is a time saver for a select area of retopology, nothing amazing.
I appreciate seeing CG cookie continue to help push the development of Blender and hope something like this can find its way in trunk. We need more of this highly accessible tools as part of Blenders philosophy.
I bought it earlier today even though I don’t really have any need for it currently, I just appreciate good work being put into making Blender more usable. Btw it works great in conjunction with the Bsurfaces addon.
I would really like to see a change of licenses for Blender so that we can have more commercial plugins being developed for Blender, not only small tools using a donation-like system with the code freely available on Github but also bigger, propriety plugins like FumeFX, RayFire, Golaem Crowd, Beast, Thinking Particles, Vray/Arnold, CAT, HairFarm, Enlighten and many more. That has been a wet dream for me in all my years with Blender. Anything that helps Blender integrate better with studio pipelines is more than welcome and not forcing helpful components like OpenSubDiv to change licencing for us to be able to use it.
Sorry for the assumption. Of course there are many end-goals for retopology. No, one tool need not satisfy every one to be considered impressive. Yes, I’m aware game assets don’t render well in Cycles…I’m not sure what the point of that observation was!
Indeed, it was a rhetorical question. No need to dwell on that one.
I, like many other Blender users am a Hobbyist (who happens to take his hobby very seriously). I cannot justify the price-tag on something that doesn’t at least serve all the purposes that Blender does for free. Not to say that I couldn’t save up for 3d coat (or anything else for that matter), but it’s not just a money issue, it’s a time issue. I’d rather expend my energies on the intricacies of one software suite as much as possible.
If I were a professional 3d artist, it would be another story entirely.
I get what you’re saying, though. I’m certainly not trying to coax you into being impressed (not sure what the point would be) – I just think it’s silly to try and squash excitement, when that kind of excitement could spur more coders to jump onboard.
There are more practical times to squash fanboyism – like when said fanboys are being a nuisance. This is not one of those cases.
