I’m not interested in “powerful” let alone “clean” (a word I dread when people talk about user interfaces/web design/architecture/etc). It’s like this is one of the basic, most basic functions of 3D.
It’s like somebody taking the thumb hole out of the artist’s palette and saying there’s this new thing where you can define any hole you like and okay it’s half a dozen operations but look at all the holes you can have and the artist is like, okay, but now can I just have my thumb hole back please?
I’m starting to worry they’re doing way to much arseing about with things that don’t need changing. The development effort for Blender is, we know, budget/time constrained. Why they’re dicking around with taking the dots off faces and scrapping wireframe is really getting disturbing.
Driver: Where are the brakes?
Designer: We’ve implemented a range of deceleration modes. You can assign any combination of controls if you like, just tap your windscreen here and here and here and…
Driver: Yes, but where is my freaking brake pedal?!
I can totally understand what you guys are saying and I agree. It’s a basic function that should just work without much fussing. What I was hoping for though is the ability to craft you’re own view presets. Some people might like the way wireframes work now, some people may want to see the surfaces just slightly showing through, some people may want to see only the front faces in wire, ect., etc. So, you probably won’t be able to please everyone with the current presets.
What I’m hoping for is that there are a few presets based on what everyone agrees is the most basic features. Then, if you want, you can customize those presets to your hearts content and save those changes. So there would be four basic presets that work however they work but you can customize them beyond that.
At least this can be really easy to do as an addon, I guess we just have to wait for 2.8 to be a little more polished until users will starts adding missing bits with python.
wireframe, solid, lookdev, rendered preview - they’re all different at their base, unlike things such as overlays that you can just toggle, you can’t replace these modes with presets because they are inherently different modes. The best you could do is have some presets within each mode.
Same as Indy here, I’m all for this wireframe mode, but I’d really like to be able to make my own presets and toggle them simply from a pie menu instead of going into the popover each time and click three or four checkboxes. It seems like we’ve been misunderstood a little - we all want direct access to this stuff, obviously.
I do not understand all the fuss with wireframes in developers site. The user just wants to have access to a single quick/fast key shorcut to a mode that allows to do what Z does in 2.79:
If they can improve visibility and usability it in 2.8, it would be even better. But as a starting point, this working as in 2.79 is enough.
I think that you perfectly know what you are doing when you write things in the way you express them, and you know perfectly well the reaction you will get in the forum. I have expressed many times in the forum that I do not like Pie Menus and that I do not feel comfortable with it, and nobody ever felt attacked or offended.
BTW - has anyone heard if there’s going to be a shading mode for retopology with the viewport update?
Something like RetopoFlow, Modo or ZBrush have - meaning: Semitransparent polygons overlayed over the base topology. A shader that doesn’t bury polygons underneath the surface and fades out backfacing polygons/vertices so that they don’t interupt workflow on a complex model, either.
Retopology in general would be good to properly support in Blender.
To support this well, we both need better tools and further viewport changes. It’s not really the focus right now, but it’s something that should ideally be looked at.
If/when we get around to it, I think the best way to support Retopology well, would be a different mode, specifically for it. Just like Sculpt Mode modifies meshes but in a different way, Rotopology Mode would do the same. The mode would display the mesh in the correct way, allow you to define another Object or Collection to retopologize, and allow for special tools that allow you to ‘paint’ topology onto your objects.
It’s a bigger project though, so don’t hold your breath.
Yes - that would be really cool and I would absolutely be in favor of this (as gameart retopology is currently pretty much 60% of my workload). A dedicated retopo shader is the most important thing that could maybe even be achieved rather easily as well as a short term fix (?).
Most of the shortcomings in retopology can at least be somehow overcome. The viewport, really works against the user in that regard, though. You either have a modifier that needs to hover above the target meshes, that is buried partially inside the geometry or that has backfacing (and selectable!) geometry visible throughout the whole geometry. None of these is really ideal as the main thing with retopology is first and foremost two things:
1.Clearly seeing your new model on top of the underlying geo
2. Having a focused toolset that snaps new geometry onto the source meshes.
The toolset could certainly be better, or more streamlined and with a few more helpers - but for the bread and butter work it’s all there, basically. For a dedicated retopo Toolset there is RetopoFlow 2.0 as a comercial adon. And it does in fact have a LOT of the things needed. One of its biggest strengths is ironically one of my biggest gripes with it: You can’t use Blender’s regular toolset while using retopoflow.
It uses a dedicated viewport, has a really adequate shader for retopology and is able to project on any arbitrary set of meshes. It has dedicated (and really awesome) retopology brushes and a superb mirror mode. But as soon as you leave the Retopoflow ecosystem every one of the benefits is gone. The viewport and symmetry don’t work exactly the same way, projection is back to the standard limitations and especially the shader is gone.
I think if there was at least a retopology shader in the near future that would help a great deal until there can be an actual workflow update, later down the road.
Until then I think I still have to stick to Modo, there.
The ‘danger’ of a separate mode is that the designer of it might consider tools that are essential to me ‘modeling tools’ and leave them out. Would a viewport preset/workspace not serve the same purpose? Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favour of a new mode (for unwrapping as well), but I can see potential pitfalls of this approach.
The main thing here is having a viewport setting that makes the relationship between the retopology mesh and underlying mesh clear, and that can be as ‘easy’ as the transparency of Topogun or Retopoflow
Well, most of the good rotopo tools I’ve seen behave in a different way compared to regular modeling tools. They have special, higher level tools to modify the mesh flow.
That said, the display is a big important part of what would make retool work better. We even discussed doing something during the Code Quest to fix/improve the display of meshes for rotopo, but ran out of time.
There’s no good way to set up the viewport for rotopo currently, so it’d be great to do something here.
The main issue is one of design - how do we expose this? As a viewport thing? An object display setting? You’d only want it for one object, so it doesn’t fit well being a viewport shading setting.
I don’t think we need an entire template - we could just have a Workspace for it.
But the question remains, how to implement it? As a viewport setting, mode setting or object setting?
Currently, we have something called Hidden Wire - we’ve had this option for years. This was meant for retopo and can be enabled in Edit Mode -> Overlays. But it’s not a very good display and not very discoverable.
The retopo mesh gets lost inside the the object you are trying to retopo, and you can’t see the difference between wires that have faces, and just loose wires.
It’s also limiting that it only exists in Edit Mode. It means the retopo display goes away when you exit Edit Mode.
Yes I use it all the time, don’t know why people don’t use it.
I think, people could do their own template for retopology, it’s pretty easy now IMO.
What’s lacking is some base tools to start a retopo.
The new active poly tool can be enough for retopo in fact, just need something to start it on a reference like
If object selected > when clicking on the active tool, activate snap face, add shrinkwrap etc.
Oh my … I don’t want to derail the discussion about how to best implement a retopo shader - but I’ve started posting up the most important tools from my perspective (for further down the line). Sorry - I’ll just post this as a “this would be cool if you ask me” and then write up a second post just for what I think a topo shader/setup might work (which is essentially showing how modo does it and then maybe derailing a little more towards how it could work in blender). Before that, though … Topo tools:
Modo sort of does the same thing, here. It uses basically all the existing tools from the repertoire and creates presets for them. In fact I can boil down Modo’s retopology workflow to four tools which carry most of my work:
The topology pen
surface snapping in regards to normal vectors, not only screen projection
a standard line pen to create edges and connect them afterwards
an edge ring tool that creates (spline)edge rings around geometry
The most versatile tool is the topology pen as it combines some very important functions in one preset without much need to switch over. Modo’s topopen is able to:
create single quads
extrude single edges
extrude a row of edges up to a certain degree
insert edge loops
slip edge loops
snap-weld vertices or edges within an adjustable distance.
move single vertices, edges or faces by simply click-dragging (no prior selection needed)
The standard pen tool simply creates connected polylines that can afterwards be connected to polypatches. Nothing overly fancy - mostly like Ctrl-clicking a vertex in blender. It’s just nice that shift-click starts a new polyline without the need to deselect or duplicate.
The third one is the ability to project geometry onto a surface without a modifier or a vertex-selection. Basically the surface normals dictate when geometry sticks to the surface of a mesh. Even if it is for example scaled down around the geometry:
The last one is a tool for tube-shaped geometry projecting a countour around the mesh. The countour can either be a set number of vertex cuts or a spline projection which can then be bridged with a flexible number of edges:
To be honest, the Hidden Wire display is really bad. We could make this so much better. We could:
Rename to Retopology Overlay
Make it so faces always display on top of the underlying surface, so it doesn’t get lost inside it.
Make faces display semi-transparent, so you can see difference between faces and loose edges.
But really it’d also be great if we could add tools, such as contours, a kind of polypen for drawing a path of quads, and so on - either in Edit Mode or a special Retopo mode
