Retopoflow - when?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
5

Hi.

Unfortunately (at least, this is my opinion), it has been decided that Retopoflow would have its own interface. I guess, it has been designed this way to help the user focus on the viewport and on the retopology tools (but IMO, it also brought some annoying drawbacks):

  1. The RetopoFlow UI obfuscates the rest of the Blender window (hiding other Blender toolbars and panels)

  2. It makes it impossible to use other tools at the same time, such as the Poly Build tool, or even other addons (retopology or not), addons that are usually displayed in the N panel sidebar.

  3. It also prevents the user to perform ordinary hotkeys such as CTRL+R (Loop Cut), or any of the hotkeys used by the “3D Viewport Pie menus” addon, nor custom hotkeys.

  4. Pressing “X” brings up Retopoflow’s own “Delete menu”. It removes the ability to use addons like Auto-Delete (which automatically detects if a vertex/edge/face has to be dissolved or deleted).

  5. Changing the Viewport Shading while doing Retopology is no longer possible…

It’s a commercial addon but the developers also published it on Github, letting users test it and report bugs.

To install Retopoflow 3 from Github:

Summary
  1. Download the ZIP of the Github repository (b280 branch): https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow/tree/b280 (CODE > DOWNLOAD ZIP)
  2. Unzip the file “retopoflow-b280.zip”
  3. Delete the “retopoflow-b280.zip” file (to only keep the folder)
  4. Rename the folder “retopoflow-b280” to “retopoflow”
  5. When browsing the “retopoflow” folder, you will notice that the “addon_common” subfolder is empty.
  6. Go to https://github.com/CGCookie/addon_common/tree/b280 and download the ZIP of the repository (CODE > DOWNLOAD ZIP).
  7. Unzip the “addon_common-b280.zip” file and copy its contents into the “retopoflow\addon_common” folder (this sub-folder must contain 7 elements: 4 folders and 3 files)
  8. Then delete the “addon_common-b280.zip” file that you no longer need
  9. Rezip the “retopoflow” folder and install the addon normally in Preferences > Addons > Install by selecting the “retopoflow.zip” file
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