The thing that I don’t understand is that there were grant for making retopology mode into Blender, like one year ago? And it was from people that are making Retopoflow, and as I remember it was announced as integration of this addon into vanilla Blender?
Besides this, it looks great!
It will actually have good performance now 
?
I hope the target can go way beyond 20k without performance issues now?
The problem was never the restrictions on the highpoly model but the lag after 15k Tris on the retopo target imo
That sadly didn’t achieve much. I think the scope of the project turned up to be much bigger than what was initially thought and required a big refactor of Blender.
I’m glad they’re finally abandoning their separate Retopo mode and integrating it in Edit mode, where it belongs. It was the main thing I didn’t like about their addon.
If there is a limit to working with a target mesh because of number of polys, then that is a Blender issue, not a Retopoflow issue and won’t be solved just by making a new Retopology mode. That would mean that the core Blender devs would need to do something with memory management and mesh lookup yada yada, not the Retopo team fixing the problem with the core. We already see this problem being tackled with the Sculpt mode refactor, so maybe that spills over to what you are looking for in retopology.
Well, it’s true that the retopo target was the bottleneck, but the biggest part of the performance hit was from the custom retopology overlay and needing to draw every vertex and face on top of Blender.
Dr. Denning’s work at the foundation wasn’t long enough to tackle some of the bigger challenges like Craig mentioned, but he did get Face Nearest snapping added and started the Edit Mode retopology overlay, both of which are super helpful for retopology in vanilla Blender but also make it so that some of the heavier calculations that were done in python in RetopoFlow 3 are now handled by Blender itself and are significantly faster. In RetopoFlow 4, we can get well above the previous hard limits with zero lag: https://x.com/JonLampel/status/1759613648262385975
Any timeframe for the release of version 4?
wondering aswell
I am wondering too. Any news ? Updates ?
They just sent an email to subscribers to say versions of contours, strokes and relax in edit mode are working, but not quite ready for beta testing yet. Polypen is already functional in beta.
Will retopoflow 3 customers be able to test this?
do you mind sharing the most recent version with polypen so i could test it out?
While the GPL allows for this, I’d much rather point people towards the official newsletter where (if they’re still accepting testers) you could sign up and get access: https://orangeturbine.com.
Alternatively, you could get in touch with @JonathanW or any of the other OrangeTurbine folks on here?
Hey, we do have some updates to share, but no new builds ready for testing quite yet. Here’s what it looks like as of today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrSbJK-H8dw
In short:
The initial goal when we started was to have had v4 out by last month, but our lead dev had some things come up and was not able to work on it for quite some time this year… but is now back in action.
We’ve hired another dev, JF Matheu (the lead developer of UV Flow and Sculpt Wheel) to help with RetopoFlow. He just started last week and is currently going through the backlog of version 3 issues, since we want to keep updating and supporting that for a good while still. When that’s in a good place he will also jump in to help with version 4.
Contours is almost finished but is not currently ready for testing.
PolyPen has a few edge cases that need fixing but is pretty much complete and is already very usable. Tweaking vertices has been recently improved.
Strokes has just been added but is not yet ready for testing. A few improvements over version 3 have been made, such as support for T shaped extrusions and a new extrapolation option for curved strokes.
Relax has been implemented but is not currently ready for testing. When that’s finished, Tweak should be as well since they’re so similar.
For a while I did include v4 alpha alongside v3 on Blender Market, but I got SO many people installing the wrong version and getting confused that I just decided to pull it for now.
If you want to get the new builds as they’re ready, you can sign up for the Orange Turbine beta testers email list.
Here is the most recent email, which is mostly about UV Flow but has a link to the latest PolyPen demo at the bottom.
appreciated
