 Hello, hello, welcome beautiful people My name is Wilhelm do ha and I will Have a talk about Rattopology and if we really have all the tools we need for that First thing I wanted to say it's like so beautiful to be here like it's always surprises me that you can feel so much Kindness and love on a software conference. No, that's that's amazing and I just have to say it Okay, so before I start with Rattopology. I want to tell you something about me My name is Wilhelm do ha and I've been with blender for more than 20 years Like actually the application to the art school that I applied to back then was done in blender game engine and Since then I did like a lot of stuff with blender. I did Movies I developed a lot of add-ons about 20 I did art I did sculptures and I did a lot of work for the science community like science visualizations animations, etc Here you can for example see a screenshot of my sculpture relief and for that Back in the days like many years ago. I developed also an add-on called blender cam Bender computed it is machining. So the spread was quite wide and while I was kind of working on All these works throughout the years. I had also this problem that I was always creating my materials From scratch my assets from scratch. So I was missing a library and that ended up with something called Blender kit, which is a company that I helped to run now with some beautiful people that are also here And you can meet them here and nowadays my job is mainly to Care for the people who use this service because we have over 700,000 registered users and there are hundreds of thousands people downloading stuff from us every month, so It's a lot of work, but still Sometimes I managed to steal some time for myself to do some coding and this talk will be about that It will be a bit of a developer talk, but Artists don't run away. I hope you will enjoy it too Okay, so a retopology Now I need to ask you a question Because you can make this Lesson a bit short. Please raise your hand if you don't know exactly what this retopology and how to do it in blend Good. There are people I can explain stuff too. So I will continue So retopology basically what it is like you create a beautiful artwork, right? It's beautiful in all aspects But then it kind of sucks and you need to do it again That's what's retopology about it's the technical part of the work you need to do to Make your for example if you sculpt the dynamic topology Or if you are you scanning or some wild process to create your assets then sometimes you need to create a new topology that lies beautifully on your original work and It helps you to animate stuff better, especially for characters You need good deformations for the muscles for face for everything you need to follow the anatomy Yeah, and for static assets also It's very good because you can get better UV maps UV layout like triangles don't like UV maps you might know that and Also, like you can get better texture baking like better usage of texture space better displacements, etc Right and in blender to do retopology There are a few basic things that you can switch on right you can switch on tweak mode in selection you can switch on Selection of edges and vertices at once you can switch on face projection. There is a new lay Overlay in blender 3.6 It's called retopology that kind of shows the much better and you can also switch on merging of vertices automatic And then what's fun? You only use the most basic blender tools to do your retopology here in this video I do just extrusion and snapping happens automatically because it's already on and I also use Tweaking like grabbing the vertices and moving them around and I create new faces with the F key, right? So that's the basic retopology process that you can do in blender and you can start with it in five minutes Literally, if you know these settings then you can use some amazing add-ons that might make your work faster Right mainly the F2 add-on that is directly in blender kind of creates faces in a better way You can check out the tutorial for that and then there is for example be surfaces add-on and there is there are many Other good add-ons like retopo floor or other tools and these kind of help you to add more topology at once to your mesh I kind of to be more a Bit faster, but here for example in this video. I try to raise myself With using be surfaces add-on that is directly in blender You can just switch it on and it helps you create new topology just by drawing strokes with annotation tool And it it's at the surfaces The thing is like I kind of never was faster with this add-ons because I Believe there is one principle if you do retopology and that's quite important And it's also important if you do any modeling if you need to literally grab every vertex and place it Exactly in the position where it's supposed to be now. We're talking about organic models, right and With that like you can also place the vertex while you are extruding or while you are making it So creating a mesh vertex by vertex or creating like big patches of faces like the speed of that might be kind of similar in the end and What would I say as a recommendation for a topology is that? Basically you can just learn the most basic blender tools and You will be super powerful. I also teach blender and Sometimes also experienced users when they actually know all the features of this Extrusion and face making like this very basic tools They are kind of surprised sometimes, okay, so but now let's come to the topic of this call talk And I'm a bit excited about it to show it to you because I think I found maybe something new so Can some of you tell me what is wrong with the retopology like not only in blender, but generally No one wants to do it. Okay Yeah Yeah, it can be time-consuming and you can use like quadri-flow for example in blender or like summary measure Eddons, but these are good for static assets, right? But I think like If you get fast enough, it can be like one to two hours for a complex character Maybe a bit more speaking if you are doing the process with rigging and back and forth, you know Yeah, but It's time-consuming and maybe I can help with that, right and now I Will tell you what I think that is wrong with retopology and that is That everyone is snapping the vertices to the surface of the mesh, right? that's This kind of old school and I I will try to explain you why So let's say you have a beautiful Surface is the original surface you sculpt it. Yeah, and you snap vertices to it That's the blue line and then there's the yellow line because you have a character you want to animate There's also a subdivision surface modifier and you can see there is like Distance between the yellow line and the green line, right? There is an error in it and that's what you get if you subdivide surfaces and So how to fix it like if I ask some artists like some would recommend to fix it with the shrink wrap modifier and basically like just to take the vertices and pull them a bit up, yeah, and Let's wait Yeah, no, it happens and you can see it fix it can fix actually the problem from the outside You don't see the problem from the outside of the mesh that well But actually in the cavities the problem gets worse because the subdivision surface gets further from from your surface, right? so what if we could just find another solution and that is like kind of take the vertices so that they go into such positions that the subdivision surface fits your original sculpt and so I was thinking like oh could this be done and For example also for low pulley Let's say we try to think about a case where we don't need subdivision surface We just want a nice low pulley object Then it also makes sense to offset the vertices a bit and kind of better get a better pronounced shape silhouette I don't know how about you but for me that this makes sense and I was thinking if if there is such tool that does this right and Sincerely like I didn't find it I think I checked like many at the apology tutorials also different Other tools that people use like topo gun or other other tools and I didn't find this kind of feature for offsetting vertices in this way So And I also thought like maybe it's in blender, right? Maybe after this talk somebody from the crowd comes to me and tells me Hey, this is in blender since blender 2.6 and it's in this menu That is in upper right left corner And if you click the button twice then you get this menu and then you that you can switch it on I didn't find it so I Set on to try to develop a tool that would actually do this and I also teach in a car company like they are designing cars in blender And they are doing quite a lot of retopology and they need like a nice curvature So that's how also I came back to this idea because it has been in my head for many years And I found out it is doable. So here we can see like this new tool that I'm developing and You can see that actually like it's possible to match the surfaces quite precisely and It's basically like inverting the subdivision right checking the offsets and there is an interesting tool Like now you can see it like for example on a character where I just do extrusions That if you move one vertex in the subdivision surface Modifier right and move it up for example the surface on the next neighbor vertex moves to right So if you kind of fix it on one vertex and you screw up the other ones, so The error or the fix you make on it propagate So that what is interesting on it then you're running basically something like a simulation like a closed simulation because Always one nerve text vertex next is influenced right? So this new tool actually can also influence neighboring vertices Depending on your setting and it can also run in real time like a simulation while you are modeling So while you are modeling you can kind of use this snapping to To get immediately the results you want and then you can kind of save on topology Or like see if you really need to add more topology for the subdivision surface. I will give you the second Here you can see trying me on a Basically just a random downloaded asset from the internet. So sorry. This is not my artwork It's from one of the artists who upload to blender kit and you can see it's kind of correcting all the time with the green arrows It's showing it and I was waiting for this slide because this shows clearly like the difference between the classical system Where this is with shrink wrap modifier on right? so and if I switch it off and you can see like the Difference in the error between these two approaches and it's kind of in millimeters or something It's this color coding. That's just a geometry notes setup that does this okay, and so This just works and I also thought about like what This algorithm would could do of other stuff because it kind of influences also other Tools or other processes you need to do with 3d For example blender has unsubdivide feature in the cement modifier You might know it and you might also know it Reconstructs the original topology of the middle So it kind of shows you how the friend who sent you the file or your friend yourself from the path who applied the modifiers and Kind of throws the possible changes You know and now you can see the topology, but you don't get the original shape Right, so I tried again with the two if I could for example make a new better unsubdivide tool and turns out it's possible and This example Shows me actually trying like how precise the algorithm is because I thought like okay It's kind of a bit iterative algorithm So I didn't expect it to be precise, but I realized that the precision can be up to the decimal Numbers that blender can show me so it's actually like in blender numbers. It's precise these tools that's what something I was surprised with and Yeah, that's about it and last thing to show you is that I Was thinking also about another thing that while modeling You know and when you are creating a new model with subdivision surface like every loop you add is changing the shape That's logical and most of the time. It's something you want to do, right? But sometimes you just want to in organic modeling or whatever you want to add geometry and loops and You need them on one side of the mesh and on the other side of the mesh You just want to keep your curvature. You want to keep the same shape, right? so It turns out like if you just make a shadow copy of the mesh You are just doing and switch this on for a while Then you can actually add new geometry and as you can see like the curvature then kind of compensates and doesn't change I mean if you add the Geometry, yeah, I will give it a while because this example shows it nice Yeah, now it's nicely visible what it does and that's about it. It's quite simple This talk was quite short because we are at the finish But I was excited about it and maybe like if you know that this this two in blender exists already Like come to me like ten minutes after the talk, please like so that I can have like ten minutes of joy and Also Yeah, and I'm sorry for that. It's not that released. It will be soon like in weeks and You will find it on github and also probably on blender kids site or wherever and that's about it If you want to contact me, I will be here of course with this t-shirt and If I go to interested like in in this and Yeah, we have also a blender kid community meetup that is tomorrow at 2 o'clock in sigrum, so we're invited to come there Okay. Thank you very much