I have a model that’s been part created in a cad application and needs to be finished off in Blender. I have the STL file which loads and the model looks great as it is, but of course it’s all tri’s. It’s going to be pretty impossible to make the changes and additions needed with the mesh as it is.
Thankfully the main shape of the model is an angled cylinder with some very basic shapes added here and there, then spangles and dingles have been added. Or whatever they’re called.
So, I can either battle for hours and hours banging my head against all these triangles and get nowhere, or spend a bit of time remodelling and ultimately get the job done in half the time.
The problem is I don’t know how to place a new cylinder and shapes in the scene exactly matching the existing verts. Is this possible, or is it going to be an eye ball process matching side and front and side and front until I call it close enough?
If the end result is purely visual (or at least doesn’t need to be dimensionally EXACT for printing, manufacturing, etc) then I would simply use the model as an underlay and begin eyeballing it like you mentioned. Unless it’s really bad, you may be able to salvage a single loop from an edge of the cylinder and work off of that.
All that being said, it will be hard to get a lot of response on this forum without posting at least an image.
I think I need to redo a model that I’m working on and so I’m going to try to retopo it. I’m a complete beginner but I found this guide. Maybe it would also help you? (I haven’t tried it yet though so I can’t say for sure if it works or not…)
That’s a pretty good guide for the low-level mechanics of retopo. On a high level, retopology is about comprehending the fundamental form of the object, and then expressing it in as elegant a way as possible. It can be quite challenging, so don’t be discouraged if your results aren’t great the first few tries, or take a lot of time. There’s a lot of skill involved, which just means you will eventually be very good once you’ve practiced!
