My grease pencil sticks to the object surface but the generated surface mesh goes straight across between the pencil lines disregarding the object surface.
This is a really cool script Thanks
My grease pencil sticks to the object surface but the generated surface mesh goes straight across between the pencil lines disregarding the object surface.
If you’re drawing only two strokes try using more grease pencil strokes in between, those will define the surface.
If that’s not the problem please post an image of the problem to help you better.
I thought I copied the retopo-settings, but my retopo mesh is too long, is
there a .blend file available? I’m using blender 2.5 alpha 2 from March 3, 2010,
don’t have all of the modifier settings that the movie has.
In that screenshot it seems that the new surface object is not at location x=0, y=0, z=0… for the moment the new mesh object needs to be at location 0,0,0.
If that doesn’t fix it, let me know… (a front/side views screenshot would help too.)
I think I have it, here’s a freeware guy, the mcs_dude, I’m just not
getting the mirror (and probably other stuff) but the shrinkwrap is going on the face.
http://terrymorgan.net/surface_sketch.zip
247K
http://terrymorgan.net/images/mcs_dude.jpg
53K
Slick!
In that file if you put the origin of the new object at the same location of the human, then the mirror works well. And remember to use the option “Keep Above Surface” in Shrinkwrap modifier.
Also may feel better to work with the human subdivided at least once.
hi,
script is now in Add Ons, should be in graphicall builds very soon.
updated script,
put in addons folder, enable script in user prefs . add ons.
for revision 28200 or later.
Surface Sketching script
enjoy.
Hey, i didnt read whole thread, script is amazing…
For idea about defining amount of quads per some distance…
Lets say that one quad should take 0.5 blender units
and lets say that distance between strokes is 3.6 units.
We go
3.6/0.5=7.2 ==>round to 7 faces
new quad size is 7/3.6 = just a tiny bit lower than 0.5 units
I hope that’s not totally confusing 
quote:In that file if you put the origin of the new object at the same location of the human, then the mirror works well. And remember to use the option “Keep Above Surface” in Shrinkwrap modifier.
unquote
Aha! It was at 0,0,0, in object mode but not edit mode, thanks. Now for the 1st non-topo
free sketching part of your video, I need a dummy tutorial, do I make a plane and
delete the vertices? What type of grease pencil, view, cursor, surface, stroke? I can make
plenty of pencil marks but no meshes appear when I ‘add surface’.
hike1. I think that understanding how grease pencil works might be crucial to successful use of the script. Once you have hang of how grease pencil works, everything is a breeze. Just eatch tutorial videos couple of times and everything is easy.
is it possible to download the video
so can look at it several times and learn all the details
or review it later on !
Thanks
i got 258 version
i can see that thesurface tool is included and i tried to follow the video but having some difficulties
can someone help a little here
first do i need to start grease pencil in N transfrom panel ?
then i can start the script in add ons panel
then how do i get the new surface panel in tool bar ?
Thanks
you first start script in add-ons panel
enter edit mode of an object
start grease pencil (new layer)
new surface panel appears autaomatically at the bottom of the tools
ok got the surface to work in 258
now when i add a curve wiht D key above the cube it does not go on the surface
so how can i get it to retopo
if i reopen the file i did before
then try to restart the script it does not wiork anymore
what can i do to restart it ?
Thanks
salutations
These are some notes, could be totally wrong |P
to use the surface sketcher from
scratch, (no retopo) make a plane, NKEY transform
it to 0 0 0, go into edit mode.
Add a new layer on the NKEY menu of
grease pencil and set the drawing
settings to “CURSOR”, and I checked
only endpoints. This makes a flat mesh,
if you deselect it the mesh can get very
long.
now tab key to edit mode if you arent’
already in it and on the TKEY menu hit
grease pencil draw, draw a curvy line,
scrool up to the surface sketching,
type in your x y grid ‘cross’ follow
settings. and add surface
You’ll get a mesh that’s actually
part of the plane you made, hit the BKEY
to go to box select and draw a box
around it, and hit PKEY to separate it
from the original plane.
I went to ‘properties’ and renamed
the new ‘mesh.001’ to ‘1st_surface’ and
the original mesh plane to ‘original_plane’
so I don’t get confused.
There are 4 drawing settings for the
grease pencil I believe that yo u’re
supposed to use ‘surface’ setting if
you’re adding on to an existing mesh, like
if you selected 4 verts, drew a grease
pencil line and hit ‘add surface’. It
seems to work anyway.
retopo tool quick start
copy the surface_sketch_hotkeys.pyc
and the surface_sketch.pyc to
c:\Blender-2.5-alpha2-win32.blender\scripts\ui
your drive letter and blender root directory name may vary, this is the
default.
if you don’t put them in ui you’ll have to
run it from the text editor every time.
load the hi-poly mesh you want a
low poly copy of, and hit the NKEY to
transform it to xyz 0 0 0.
shift-a, add a mesh- plane,
select the plane, find the
wrench icon and its 'add modifier’thing, disappears on my
blender sometimes
- Apply subdivision surface modifier
type simple
subdivisions view 3 render 2
‘subdivide uvs’ (missing on my blender 2.52)
Optimal display,
all 4 of the icons next to ‘subsurf’ are ON (colored dark)
camera, eyeball, cube with 4 orange verts-use modifier
while in edit mode,
triangle with 3 verts-apply to
editing cage. Each icon has a
tool tip.
-
Apply Mirror Modifier
axis 'X" vertex group checked
merge limit 0.1 All icons EXCEPT
the triangle with 3 verts -apply to cage-
are also ON here. -
Apply Shrink wrap modifier
This is what actually makes
the copy of the mesh
1st 3 icons ON
Target is -your high poly mesh
offset is 0.02-height above your high poly mesh?
Mode ‘nearest surface point’
‘keep above surface’ is checked
Select the cube hit NKEY, or the
little plus sign in the upper or lower right corner of the 3d view to bring up Numerical menu, transform ‘location’ to xyz all
0 0 0, now
The view may look freaky but don’t panic.
Go to ‘edit mode’ TAB of the plane, you’ll see your plane again, hit x (delete) ‘VERTICES’
now hit NKEY tools menu, select
AKEY all of the plane if it isn’t
and Transform xyz 0 0 0, the
now the plane disappears and you
can’t transform it anymore.
on the TKEY tools menu under mesh tools
you should see ‘grease pencil’ ‘draw’
‘line’ ‘erase’ on the NKEY panel there
should be an entry for grease pencil,
this should be set to surface, not
view, cursor, or stroke. Not sure about
‘only endpoints’, this is supposed to keep
the 3d grease pencil lines from going
awry.
to draw a line I hit ‘draw’ in the TKEY
menu at bottom of 'mesh tools’for every line I want. MUST BE IN
EDIT MODE! then at the top there’s a
‘surface sketching’ menu
you pick cross:
follow: which is your x and y
of the mesh your’re creating. If you
don’t like the result, go to the Outliner
menu and delete the ‘Temp strokes’ Don’t
delete the “MEsh” that’s your plane you
made. You can also go to the NKEY
greas pencil and hit the X to delete the
grease pencil strokes. CTRL-Z doesn’t
do this.
Zooming, panning viewport is disabled
during grease pencil drawing
the grease pencil defaults to cursor every time so you have to manually choose surface
every time.
If you ‘add surface’ with the wrong
number of verts, cross, (number of edge
rings crossing the strokes, perpendicular
to stroke direction)
follow number of edge rings parallel
to strokes
I thing I just tried on my retopo is to select a few verts, like on the bottom lip
of the head in the video, set ‘follow and cross’ to 1 apiece then draw 1 grease pencil
surface line, this gives fewer polys. You can then go to more polys presumably. Copying the video’s
many cross and follow with many lines resulted in either nothing or polys that were
in outer space.
Thanks for all the details at least it’s explain with some words
better would be a video with some voice explainng theses features!
hope someone can make a video with voice it would be a lot easier to use this script!
Thanks man
@ristesekuloski and hike1
Thanks for helping out!
hike1, seems you got it quite right. About if it’s necessary or not to delete the vertexes of the plane, that just depends on you, but deleting it seems the most practical thing to do.
Good, thanks for the heads up.
I was thinking something similar but this looks as a simplified way to do it. I tried to implement it but things are not as straightforward and simple as I thought, and right now I’m not entirely sure if it would make sense to be able to define a fixed length. Maybe it does, but check this example:
which ends up with a surface like this:
In that example there are strokes of different lengths, so if we define a fixed length, that length would never be respected in every part of the surface.
The things is: What rule should be taken to apply that length? for instance we could take the first grease pencil stroke, and the others would respect only the proportions. Or maybe take the largest stroke instead of the first?. Or an average of all strokes?
Hi
I have problem.
From the image alone is a bit difficult to know. It could be a bug or maybe the lines are one from left to right and the other from right to left, or there is other selection in a place outside the 3D view that is not seen but affects the result, or maybe the strokes look near the vertex but if they were done without “Surface” option for grease pencil, when rotating the view, they are far from the vertexes.
But I’m just guessing, if you can share a blend file I could help you better.
I’m sorry my English is not good
I’m sure that everything I did was right.
Blend is here http://www.xhn.xf.cz/retopo.blend