Surface Constraint Tools is designed to simplify the process of modeling on the surface of another mesh. Therefore, you may find it useful for retopology tasks.
For example, the “Surface Constraint” section of the UI, as seen above, allows a user to select a target on which to constrain the vertices of the active mesh. The “Mesh Brush”, “Shrinkwrap”, and “Smooth Vertices” operators comply with this constraint. Moreover, if you would like for the constraint to affect all mesh operators, simply enable the button with the car icon.
Proper documentation does not yet exist. The addon is meant to be intuitive, but I can address any usage concerns in this thread should they arise.
To install the addon, click the “Install from File…” button within the “Addons” tab of Blender’s “User Preferences” area, and select the downloaded zip file.
well, I understand you about the documentation, but, can you do at least a video tutorial? it would not take so much time from your life, yet, it could be very useful for the users! Thanks for the addon!
If the active object and the surface constraint target are the same, the Smooth and Mesh Brush operators relax vertices while preserving form.
Use the surface constraint projection mode that best accomodates your needs. For example, constraining to the “Closest Point” will prevent vertices of the retopologized mesh from slipping over the boundaries of the target object.
well, I tried it, it is quite useful for the retopo process, especially combined with other tools, however, I was wondering, is it possible to create such operator for radial symmetry selection specially for selecting verts/edges/faces on a mesh? I was dreaming about such a tool for a long time…
I suppose it is possible, but I’d have to explore the problem in more detail, which is something that I don’t have the time to do currently.
Indeed, collaboration can be a great thing, but, unfortunately, I’m currently too busy with other matters to develop Blender addons. This one was just sitting on my hard drive collecting dust. So, I figured it may be of use to some people. I will continue to squash bugs in it as they pop up.
Good catch! It was working in 2.71, but 2.72 seems to have introduced some silent changes that affect ray casting. I’ll look into the issue.
