RetopoFlow 4

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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Hey everyone, I’ve seen a few threads here and on other sites asking about the recent status of RetopoFlow. Email and Twitter have been our main places to chat with the community for a while, but with Twitter disintegrating and email not being very easily discoverable, it’s about time we have an official thread on Blender Artists again!

For those not familiar, RetopoFlow is a full suite of sketch-based retopology tools for Blender.

To see how the tools currently work in RetopoFlow 3, watch the following tutorial:

RetopoFlow 4 is a complete rework of the tools that integrates them seamlessly into Blender’s Edit Mode, removing the need for a separate RetopoFlow mode that blocks the rest of Blender’s UI. It also completely eliminates the main source of lag that’s present in version 3.

This project has been a significant amount of work, mostly undertaken by Dr. Jon Denning, and has taken quite a long time to complete. Its history stretches back to before the retopology overlay and face nearest snapping were added to Blender natively, both of which Dr. Denning helped Blender to implement, and which have their roots in RetopoFlow.

To get email updates with new builds, the initial release for free, and a discount for purchasing it on the Blender Market after the release, join our beta testers list.

If you find a bug, please report it on GitHub. If you have a question or feature request, ask it here!

You can see the latest updates to the tools in these videos:

We’ve made a lot more progress in the last couple weeks, so I will be sharing out a new build and new video soon.

RetopoFlow 4 will be the first upgrade we’ve charged for in over a decade. People who purchased the tools over a decade ago are still getting full support and upgrades to this day. We are very proud of this track record and do not plan to start charging frequently but also realize that never charging is not exactly sustainable. Continually finding new customers has been enough to cover maintenance and support for existing customers for years, but not enough to do the necessary work of overhauling the whole thing, at least in any reasonable amount of time.

Because we are planning to charge for this upgrade, we have been able to ramp up another developer, JF Matheu (of UV Flow and Sculpt Wheel) to help us maintain RetopoFlow 3 for current customers as well as work on new features for the tools alongside Jon once version 4 is released.

So yes, RetopoFlow 3 will still be getting updates for some time (our target is for two years) so that it will continue to work with the latest versions of Blender.

Thank you so much for your support of this project, whether you’ve purchased the tools or just cheered us on in the comments - it means a lot. With this latest version we finally have a very real shot at developing not just the best retopology tools for Blender, but the best retopology tools in the industry. There are a lot of very fun things that will become possible if we get the foundation of version 4 right… but one thing at a time.

For now, give the tools a try and let me know what you think!

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this is revolution!!

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Great update!
Will there be something similar with drawing function and automatic geometry creation like in cozy blanket?

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Hi, we have had the Strokes tool for a long time, which allows for sketching out and filling geometry with a variety of gestures. In v4, it’s been upgraded to support more types of gestures.

strokes

strokes

More examples:
https://x.com/RetopoFlow/status/1871630076540059704

The main difference between it and what I see in the CozyBlanket videos is that Strokes requires selection for extrusions. This makes the results more predictable and enables more versatile actions but can be slower in some cases because the selection adds more clicks. It should be possible to intuit the right selection for C shaped strokes and D shaped fills when nothing is selected to help save time. I’ll add that to our list of things to explore after the initial release.

For extruding single quads or creating Triangles, PolyPen is going to be much faster than any gesture (single or double tap vs. drawing a whole shape), and we plan to have a hotkey for quick PolyPen insertion when using the other tools like Strokes.

Also, I do not have an iPad, so I’ve actually not used CozyBlanket. I would be interested to hear how they compare once RetopoFlow 4 is more fully fleshed out.

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Sounds cool.
I didn’t know about some of the features of Stroke.

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PolyStrips is being added!

blender_0ogwMIEYRW

There is also a new operator in all tools for cleaning up any geometry not generated by RetopoFlow (like Blender’s knife tool) that is not automatically snapped to the surface, or any geometry that has doubles, flipped faces, etc.

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I will be sending out a new build with the recent improvements later this week to the beta testers list.

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Very excited to see all the improvements, you guys are doing an amazing job!

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Feeling very intuitive! loving this and UV flow, was wondering though if the mirror option is unavailable currently in the alpha as I am unable to find its option

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Hey, so glad to hear it!

Currently version 4 does not do anything with mirroring. Version 3 just used the mirror modifier under the hood, so I’ve assumed people would use their own mirror modifier here.

It would be nice to rely on Blender’s Edit Mode symmetry, but that’s pretty broken for most operations. For the initial 4.0 release I think we will just make sure that use with the mirror modifier is fully supported (currently a few bugs to fix there, like with clipping) and that’s it.

If it’s helpful I could add a menu to add, adjust, and apply a mirror modifier in the tool header in the next update. That would be easy enough.

Longer term, I’d like for us to first support Blender’s Edit Mode symmetry and then go in and fix it for other tools in Blender core so that it’s actually usable in the workflow.

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Hey there Lampel! since Mr Denning made possible the built-in the new retopology overlay in edit mode, i would like to suggest the idea of a few features that will benefit blender and retopoflow: (considering retopoflow will use partly the same blender retopology overlay, i am correct?).

  • Wireframe Thickness: (in pixels and also this would be an override per object and an override to the blender’s default wireframe thickness)

    • Base Thickness (Pixels)
    • Color/Opacity

  • Wireframe Dynamic Size lock/unlock:

    • Dynamic / Camera/Scene/Zoom To Cursor Calculated Size (Wireframe thickness dynamically increases/decreases based in zoom level to the nearest retopology object over the mouse cursor).
    • Fixed / Fixed Pixel Size.

  • Wireframe Overlay Settings:

    • All Objects or Global Toggle (applies to all retopology objects visible in the scene).
    • Single Object Toggle (applies a custom wireframe setting).
    • Wireframe color (also applied per single object or to all objects toggle).

  • Utilities:

    • Copy Active Object Wireframe Settings To Selected.
    • Restore Default Wireframe Settings.

Other feature to suggest but for maybe for a custom x-ray lasso/box/tweak/circle selection, because IIRC there was a debate on the devs side of not supporting “xray selection” mode for the default selection tools, but there is a free or paid addon that does that called X-Ray Selection.

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Indeed, we are using the Blender overlay now and not a custom one. To be honest though, I don’t really see the utility of this proposal. Is the thickness of the edges of the retopology overlay a big issue? Why would it be helpful to control on a per-object basis? Are there other apps that do this? Bumping up the Edge With option in the theme preferences improves clarity quite a bit if that’s what you’re after. Implementing a whole system for it sounds a bit overcomplicated IMO.

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Blender mirroring being available for all tools (extrude, inset, marking seams and other attributes, etc) would be incredible. I currently do use it, but find it so limiting!

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Ah yeah I assumed so, I was using blenders mirror modifier but the clipping would not work sadly, I did quite enjoy the mirror modifier in 3.0 that allowed you visualize it as well by masking the mirror side so a small menu for that would be much appreciated!