Forum: Blender


Subject: The Retopo Tool . . . . . Need a GOOD Tutorial

fls13 opened this issue on Feb 07, 2007 · 9 posts


oldskoolPunk posted Thu, 08 February 2007 at 7:57 PM

Yea the new sculpting tool as alot better than the old one. Not really my style, but I would prolly get more enjoyment out of it if I had a tablet to work with.

I did a quick example of retopo paint here if you wanna check it out, this is the really amazing part of the tool I think. I dont want to start much with it till the official release, but here is a little text of it with a sphere.

Press 1 on the numpad and add a 32x32 UV sphere. This will be the "original mesh".

Next make sure the cursor is out in front of the sphere a little.

Next was the tricky part. You can only retopo paint in edit mode, BUT the new mesh you paint wont deform to another mesh that is in edit mode at the same time. So while in object mode, I added a plane, then deleted all the vertices. This has me in edit mode,  ready to start painting a new mesh. You can see the centerpoint in the middle of the 3d cursor. Im not sure if this is the proper way, but there is very little info on this yet and this is how I got it to work the way I wanted it to.

Now click the retopo button and the paint button.(or Pain button, lol)

Now press 1 on the numpad to reset to front view. You'll see 3 different paint tools. One is for circles, one is for lines, and one is freehand. I made a few lines using the line tool. Remember, all Blender keeps up with are where the lines intersect, for verts.

You can angle your view a little to see how the lines are following the shape of the sphere.

When you TAB out of edit mode, it will convert the lines into a new mesh. I then tabbed back into edit mode for this picture so you can see how the mesh follows the shape of the sphere.

Like I say I haven't done too much with this yet, but seems like theres alot of possibilities. You can move and extrude from this new mesh, and everything will still conform the the background object. Now we can model our faces willy nilly and worry about "proper topology" later :) Also seems like an excellent way to model conforming clothing!

oodmb that is a good suggestion. Proper topology is a subject of much debate! And it is a subject I tend to look over, lol. If it looks good in the final animation, I am not to concerned that my topology isn't "proper". There is alot for me to learn in that area :)