 Wow. Okay, that's a lot of people. Thank you all for joining. So I prepared no slides. I'm just gonna show this all directly in Blender. But first off, who am I? My name is Julian Kasper. I work at the Blender studio, mainly as a character artist for modeling, sculpting and other tasks. So I worked on previous open movie projects like Spring, Coffee Run, Settlers, and then also the latest production that is currently called Project Heist. So in those productions we went through various different styles and I wanted to present some of that knowledge that was and some of the lessons that were learned from there in this talk. I actually wanted to make this presentation like two years ago when I thought, oh yeah 2020, there's gonna be the next Blender conference. The year before that I did a live sculpting session and I knew I wanted to do a live retopology session the following year. Well this took a bit longer. This is actually interesting that like I really like retopology. This is like something I enjoyed for a long time and I remember that like I didn't actually open this in the tabs. But if you search on YouTube for Blender conference retopology you're gonna find the presentations from Jonathan Williamson which are now like, oh one is ten years ago and I remember watching these back in the day when I was still learning modeling and these were incredibly insightful. I love the information even still today. I think this is a great basis of this talk even and I wanted this sort of live retopology at the Blender conference to continue. So this is maybe a little bit of my continuation of it. So thanks a lot Jonathan. But yes but for this I wanted I guess like what I wanted to focus on this time is not like general retopology or modeling workflows but something that is more close to the actual film production at the Blender studio and I actually thought maybe I can do a full retopology of a character show something about various different aspects but I rehearsed this and I was like okay I can do at most facial retopology. So this is like one of the examples that I did over a year ago for my course at the Blender studio website but if I compare this this is the actual retopology that was used for the character Rain which can be downloaded for free online. This is fully rigged but this was also a character that was directly going into there was directly a learning ground for me of how can I optimize retopology and is it really interesting because retopology is sort of a puzzle. You usually start from some sort of design if it's a 2D concept or already a finished sculpt and then you try to make an optimized mesh out of that while still capturing all of the shapes the creases all the surface details that you need in the actual mesh and ideally you want those those shapes and those details to shine to really be represented in both the subdivided and the low-poly version. You want to make it easy to select stuff in the retopology that any rigor or anyone who needs to work on this can very easily select loops and parts of the geometry very easy it should be easy to work with and it should be performant so whatever you're building shouldn't be too high-poly because that might just end up being too taxing on either the viewport performance or maybe even final rendering if you are having a lot of crowd characters in the background or depends on what you're actually aiming to do. So based on that this puzzle has many different solutions and I think it's actually interesting that every time I do a retopology the result tends to be very different because I think it's once you actually abide to some principles or know what you're actually aiming for it's hard to really go wrong which doesn't mean it's super easy but it's it becomes less confusing and in this file for example I actually put in a bunch of examples this is the first one and I think that like I can enable some colors over here this was sort of like one of the first sample topologies that I created just to experiment how clean can you make it. I love it when people show actually online their retopologies and you can see that it's very very well flowing in a certain direction you can it's very easy to dissect and it's very easy to showcase with these colors they're very clearly defined circular and square patches so this also makes the retopology fairly generic you could use this sort of setup for various different characters especially when you're going for more cartoony or stylized style where there's less of a difference between the different characters but yes the interesting thing is typically you don't I don't just start from a finished sculpt or design before I go into retopology I started to really like going into some exploration some more experimentation before committing to the topology and I actually usually for example for the character rain I did a bunch of expression tests which are all just sculpted on top of a very very temporary topology that was just meant for multi-resolution sculpting but this these sorts of experimentations already give you a bit of insight of what expressions are needed where creases need to form in the face and what actually works with the style that you're going for so it turns are very informative and I did this also then for the follow-up character and especially for movie productions like sprite fright where the characters tend to be very cartoony very simplified you realize what is even required of the topology what what do you where do you need creases to form or do you even need any variation in the surface details so this is all sort of style exploration and you can create a style guide from this which will be massively influential for the retopology if I go back to blender the wrong one I actually I can hide the wireframes for a bit I actually set up some grease pencil lines over here to kind of dissect how I tend to think about topology because retopology especially for the face because there's more behind it but I think it can be very easily broken down into specific requirements and then from that you can already use that as a starting point if needed to build the topology from that so first off I like to think of the general edge flow and I think this is something fairly universal for most part humans tend to have the same edge flow so you have this tends to follow the general shapes of the face the general forms but also something like muscle movements so if you know that there's going to be movements around the mouth and the eyes in a certain direction you can be fairly certain that the loops of the topology should follow this flow so this is kind of a nice guideline to take as the the fundamental basis so there's like a loop going around the eyes around the nose well up then probably also the nose holes the mouth and then very importantly around the nasolabial fold over here where creases tend to form very often but then from there you can start to kind of dissect the shapes of the actual face because in here I was from the sculpt I was able to determine okay there are specific creases hard-etched lines that go across the face and these should always be visible these can already be hard modeled into the topology so once you subdivide it you will always have a nice hard crease in these areas but this also starts to quickly include secondary creases which are not visible by default but this is where you really start to draw from the expression tests and whatever else you have for the expressions for the style expiration where you can see there are certain areas in the face where you want creases to form that could be especially around the nasolabial line over here on the mouth and the eyes if you're like look if she's looking angry or compressing her forehead or like squishing compressing different areas of the face and what these areas typically need is like one loop directly on the crease where it needs to form or it needs to already exist and then two proximity loops right next to it and in the case for the secondary creases these proximity loops can then be read via the rig squished together and you can get that nice crease anytime you need it something I found out after looking up Brian Tindall and his educational material which I found actually quite fascinating is the his theory on articulation so there is a sort of an ideal that minimum amount of loops that you could follow that you can abide by when it comes to the eyes the eyebrows in the mouth typically those areas need a lot of deformation a lot of different shapes that you want to achieve and it's interesting that if you want to have a lot of freedom for creating these shapes you can imagine like for example with with the eyebrow that just like with a rig you typically tend to have like three controls to control the end the middle the start the middle and the end this gives you already a lot of freedom but to offer even more possibilities to to control this basically this curve is to give each of these control points like to treat us treat it actually like a curve with two handles so each of these control points would have two handles to it and each of these can then be very individually controlled and actually moved around gives a huge amount of freedom but this gives you any idea of how many loops you actually need here because you need these three loops over here and then two proximity loops next to it to act as the handles and this can then directly match up with a rig to deform these areas very freely the same then goes for the eyes over here including in this case two additional ends over here which then just like kind of splits the top and the bottom half which ideally should be symmetrical and then the same for the mouth the other thing which we very strongly needed to take into consideration for a sprite fright where we had very extreme deformations of the mouth region is how far do for certain nature features actually need to move this is something you really should be aware of because depending on where you place poles or how your loops actually are directed you might not be able to move the mouth corners that far later on so this is actually very helpful to keep in mind and then the last thing that I kind of like to work with is what I call landmarks and this is typically especially for cartoony and stylized styles or even if you just have a simplified version of a of a model for the rig you have a geometry that represents for example the eyebrows and in order for the eyebrows the eyebrow eyebrow object to move in perfect unison with the underlying skin these areas should have ideally the same topology so you can anchor these objects perfectly on the underlying object so they can move together all of this gives you a sort of map of what you actually want to do what is required of this character and it's actually fascinating that like I just set this up for for rain over here and we can actually have this in comparison with the actual topology but then I kept going and I tried the same thing for for example snow which was the follow-up character same style but in this case I tried a bit of a different topology unlike with rain where you can see that everything is kind of neatly flowing into each other each pole is via an edge loop connected to another pole so you can very easily color these areas when you look at snow it's actually a bit different if I go into over here into edit mode the seams over here are kind of indicating where the different poles are sort of leading into each other and it's not as clean it's not as clear cut but because I started with this topology to more tailor the individual edge loops and the patches to his facial features I was able to add some more like highlight some more features like his pronounced chin and the different look of his ears but also his more boxy forehead and all of that with basically almost half of the amount of topology that I had for rain with the first character so this is all a bit more custom tailored to this design but it is more optimized but overall it still had very much the same requirements similar amount of well the extent where certain features need to move and where certain hard edges are placed wrecks over here from sprite fright is a very interesting counter example because based on the red line over here you can see that his mouth was supposed to extend very far into a lot of different directions and it's kind of insane we did this thing with like a cut out mouth style so you can actually see not just that the mouth is really big but we were playing with the silhouette of the other side of the mouth to make it really cartoony and also something is missing here there's not a single secondary crease for this particular design in the movie we wanted to keep the this sort of bucket head shape to be consistent and to have no fleshy creases form we actually had a different system to create fake two-dimensional creases on top so this was completely not required by the topology this is this topology was made by Angela Jeanette and it was super good based on some expression test we found out how easy it is to break the mesh if you try to make a huge mouth and you can see that based on these loops that they are basically following all around in this circular pattern and only up here in the cheek area do you see these poles which are sort of accumulating where stuff tends to not move so this was very tailor-made to this character but other principles still sort of stayed the same going further this is an hour from project heists and with this we went more for realistic style which is very different if I disable over here the other objects this is the whole face and just looking at the topology it is actually fairly generic it's kind of going a bit back to the topology that I did for the first character rain only not as high density but looking at the different grease pencil lines that I did here the expression boundaries the red line it doesn't extend very far because it's very realistic you can kind of expect what you need from this character but interestingly there's there's no landmarks because we didn't need any objects that move in perfect unison with the skin underneath because we were just adding particles on top we were adding new curved objects for spawning all of the hair and there's also no creases not even secondary creases because we I actually ended up taking this as a base for further sculpting and all of the details were baked onto this low-poly mesh so you can just capture all of these details with a displacement modifier with or extra extra height maps for shading and you don't really need to represent all of that in the low-poly model even the animators could use EV or some textured preview to display further details so this actually tends to be a very simple topology for realistic characters and over here I have an example with the actual baked version where if I switch between these these sliders it actually blends in different shape keys and displacement maps and bump maps so you can start to blend in all of these details and these differences just via the shader and modifiers so all of that is sort of offloaded from the retopology but looking at this I actually didn't even make a custom retopology for this character what I did is earlier that year I created sculpting base meshes which have like this very even very well-distributed topology and I use just I use this as a base I just sort of shrink wrapped it onto the sculpt of this realistic character made a couple of adjustments and just made sure that the loops line up with his facial features and that was it so that's actually the great thing with realistic characters because we all tend to have very similar features and proportions it's very easy to recycle the very well done retopology even like it halfway decently done retopology you can just like slap it onto a different character and it could still work or at least it could save you a lot of time because you don't need to make a new topology from scratch so that's basically that what I want to do for the rest of these 50 minutes is to actually do a bit of a live demonstration of how I go about retopologizing and for that I actually snatched a different character that I sculpted in a live stream in a bunch of live streams like a year ago by the way if you're more interested in like retopology examples there's courses online on the Blender studio website I also published a bunch of documentation on what we learned from creating realistic characters and what went well and what went wrong what we learned and then there's like a whole playlist on the Blender studio channel on live streams that I made live so this is the this talk is a bit of a compressed version of what I'm showing there you could say but before I could even start retopologizing this character I needed to straighten out some things so in this case I made a bit of a t-pose of this character I removed the hair because it's getting a bit in the way and I also I'm not going to cover it in this session and then from here I actually went through the same task of just sort of outlining the different requirements that I have for this one moment this means I actually made up some things I just sort of let's say let's assume I actually made some expression sculpts we did some concept thing some more testing and we actually know what we need of the street apology for it to work and for that I just for for example the general edge flow over here an interesting difference here is that you that we kind of need to abide to some circular loops over here around the ear and basically also around the horns and then the mouth is is a bit more complicated because it's made of such different features there's the the main creases which you can very easily see already on the sculpt and I'm just going to assume that this is a very cartoony animation style so I'm not going to add any more creases that would highlight like the eyelids or something like that but it's all rather flat and simple and then I drew in all of these secondary creases and this is just like what I could imagine forming from all kinds of expressions that this character could do interestingly because Michelle over here which is the name of the character doesn't have eyebrows I just kind of imagine that there would be creases forming whenever he would look mad or worried so this would also need some extra topology over here that would form then same story again here for the articulation for the eyebrows we need the three handle loops and then the same set sort of set up for the mouth and the eyes for the expression boundaries I would just say okay so similar as with the sprite fright characters the mouth can deform very wide and in lots of different directions and the same could also be the case for the eyes let's say when he's shocked like his eyes could expand so they need a bit more space and the only place where they would collide is directly here when they would meet with the mouth so that is a bit of a limitation there and landmarks is really just there needs to be some connection point to the to the horns you would want to move these perfectly together no swimming of topology of moving objects around they really need to be pinned to these objects same thing for the tag over here on the ear and again this gives us sort of a nice indication of a map so with this I would just turn down the opacity of this over here and actually also turn down the stroke stroke thickness so I still kind of have this reminder over here and I already have an object set up over here for the retopology and from here I would just start first off I'm going to go into workbench shading solid shading because the EV lighting can be a bit distracting there's already a bunch of modifiers set up I'm gonna get actually get rid of these two but mostly it's just like a mirror modifier with clipping enabled a shrink wrap modifier set to project because that can make sure that the even with face snapping on everything always stays on the mesh that I'm snapping to and then on top of that a sub the modifier to see the actual final results in object mode but yeah one moment okay so basically I mean a lot of people like to sort of start off with if I disable clipping over here start off with just the general eye area and I think that's actually quite fair I think eyes and mouth at the mouth are fairly default you can you kind of know what to expect and then the rest kind of comes out after that so in this case I'm basically I know there's like many different modeling workflows out there of how you can work there's like great add-ons that make retopology a lot easier for this case I'm basically just sort of going to stick to my own workflow I encourage everyone to just sort of do the same thing and see what works for them but I actually used I actually tend to use the tools over here on the side by to keep them active you I use tweak a lot so over here so first off I'm sort of following the articulation loops of where I need certain topology to be from here on what I like to do actually is to hold on to make sure that both the top side and the bottom side always stay symmetrical and for that I'm just kind of merging this area over here I'm adding one more loop over here in the center and this could sort of leads to these diamond loops over here which is a bit problematic because if you start to add a natural over here it it doesn't tend to stay or symmetrical correctly I want to keep the top and bottom side symmetrical when inserting new loops so over here what I like to do is I'm going to select these two and split this with J and then I'm going to subdivide them which creates this little two pole over here like a pole with two connected edges and if I now add an edge loop on one side it will always make sure that it's going through to the bottom side as well and this little pole over here I would just get rid of later on I don't really need it for the final retopology this is just a tool for myself to work with what I also like to do is any sort of important loops that I really need I like to highlight them with either as a seam or as a sharp it reminds me of what loops are actually really important and I want to keep sticking around but for the most part I don't bother too much about where exactly everything is placed I just really want to think about right now about what is the general topology that I need so over here I could also extrude this up for the eyebrows and in this case this loop this loop and this loop could be the main articulation handles which means these loops over here are connect are basically meant for this one these are the proximity loops to the mid this is a proximity loop to this start and I can just create a new one over here let's actually merge these and a similar thing over here right then I can just stop with this area for now and continue with the rest so I will just continue with the mouth and sort of do the same thing first the articulation areas well there we go this got a bit weird I'm just gonna delete this area like that these are the important ones just gonna highlight them where as a seam not a sharp as a seam and then I can well first off merge these areas insert another edge loop over here and I'm gonna do the same thing with the two pole over here so if I ever add an edge loop over here it just gets transfer transfer to the bottom right and then from there I can add the additional loops that I need for the articulation which I already have over here and what I'm not even bothering with right now is the creases anything like I want the the edges to already follow this this general flow but I don't want to add any proximity loops for any primary or secondary creases to capture any details because that will be so much easier to set up later on right now I just want to create these different areas these different well edge loops I'm also going to disable the mirror modifier for now same thing over here so there would be like a loop going on over here and it would meet up in the middle like that there's also going to be like you see like because of the viewport shading you're going to see all of the back facing topology on the back of the head what I actually like to do I got this tip at some point is to add a solidify modifier this is a bit of a of a cheat but if you add a bit of thickness over here you actually can obscure the back sides which in this case actually does not quite end up correctly I can invert the normals and then it should be fine so it's less distracting exactly so I also really don't want to bother too much about pushing vertices at this point it really shouldn't be that important what is just important is that there's a certain amount of loops that supports the lines that I've already drawn over here so there's like a loop going on over here which then leads into this one and then I can fill in this also over here this can be very crude very simple just continue right here and then over here I can just like start adding more edge loops like that and everything is like very jagged and unevenly placed but I'm going to get to that later trying to make everything perfect from the start is just gonna be a bit distracting so over here I can also already sort of merge this could even add an edge loop over here but even just like adding more loops later on to more evenly distribute the topology is fairly easy to do so I don't need to do that now and over here right right I'm actually going to start building the nose I also don't need to have everything connected all the time as I'm building it I can build different little islands and stitch them together later on as I need to so that I can keep my focus on individual areas make sure that they have all the loops all the necessary things for them so over here I can just extrude this be fairly free with that and over here I can already start to fill this in this down sort of like that right what I could do over here is also to just like spiral this a bit into the nose this is completely fine it's like it creates a bit of a messier well flow in the different phase loops but it can save you on some complexity now this is interesting I set up the desired amount of loops for the mouth and the eyes but I would say that it's more of a minimum necessary amount of loops in this case over here because this is also a crease I would really need to highlight this one as well and I think the the easiest way in this case would be for example to sort of add an edge loop over here highlight this area and then over here this can be fanned out and dispersed a bit more what I love to use is to actually go into scope mode in this case I could just disable these modifiers real quick what's going on over here oh right oh it's actually yes it was the normals were flipped so in this case I can go to scope mode and I love the slide relax brush this is sort of a smoothing and and moving brush but it keeps the it tries to keep the actual shape of the object intact as you're moving and sliding things around so this becomes actually really useful for retopology where once you actually want to disperse some of this topology a bit more to have it more evenly distributed you can just smooth over it which in some cases though means that certain loops will slide a bit out of place and into maybe directions that you didn't want to but it can save a lot of time you don't need to create this perfect pixel like perfect vertex pushing at the start you can create this as you go along and I am rushing this a bit like I am trying to get through the different points in reality I would like give myself a bit more time to really do this retopology as safe as possible because eventually once you start connecting things you can actually get yourself a bit in trouble where some loops are weirdly flowing into others and you need to resolve some conflicts and keeping this all separated for quite a while actually makes this very easy to manage it's something that I very very typically do with the topology of the body that I would retopologize the hand the arms the each individual limb as by itself and then only afterwards I I'm going to or even while I'm doing it I'm going to compare how these limbs could connect and then I can still reduce the amount of loops and manage this a bit more before I actually start merging and connecting geometry over here I think this is also still kind of interesting with this crease because this starts to all of these different lines start to kind of conflict with each other a bit so over here I could just sort of extrude these face loops over here now over here I'm actually going to mark these now so these are like the different sharp edges so this is also what I tend to like to do is mark these as sharp so I know that these need to actually that be or become a sharp edge with proximity proximity loops attached to them so over here this is actually quite interesting so the these are sort of starting to collide a bit and what I could do is I could create a diamond over here so I have the two proximity loops to create this crease later in the animation but they're terminating over here and then what I need to just resolve is I need to somehow make these pieces connect in this case it's completely okay if you run out of loops if you let run out of options to potentially also add more edge loops but I'm gonna try to do it just with what I have right now so over here I could like move this all together but in this case actually like to separate this again I'm going to keep one in between just so this the this proximity loop over here is and this one here they're sort of like belonging to this crease but this over here is these are the loops for the eyebrows so there they're kind of left alone oh what happened what what happened oh no okay there we go and now I can just keep filling this in it can be a little pole over here even but this is the thing like these poles over here vertices with five or more connected edges or well more than four or less than four try to first of all place them in areas where there's very little movement I think that's a very good rule of thumb because they will typically cause some strange stretching or compression by default pretty much when subdivided but also these poles over here it would be great to not place them directly on a crease so what I've for example at some point would do is let's say I want to add two proximity loops to this crease over here I don't sometimes I don't want to add like two additional edge loops that are just like flowing around the entire topology somewhere where I don't want it to be I can keep it actually fairly isolated and instead I can just take this and just bevel it with one edge loop in the center and just make sure that well it's actually try this again but one further leveling this adding one edge loop in the center and I'm going to merge these into one and get rid of like collapse this this edge over here so it ends in a diamond and this is sort of the same thing that I did up here so this area is I can relax it by default so all the necessary loops are basically there but they don't like start to go across the entire topology you can and you can keep the amount of density reduced with these diamond quads also something I typically like to use scope mode to push stuff around but as you can see the edit mode shading disappears like you don't see anymore what was marked as a sharp or a seam I guess the most class more classic workflow is to actually use the tweak tool or like tweaking in general and using that together with proportional editing and that can also have somewhat the effect of using a brush because it adds a radius to it and then you can start pushing this around if I wanted to I could add some more loops over here it's fine for the I would say if for the articulation areas it's fine if the left and the right side are asymmetrical but ideally you should keep the top and the bottom side symmetrical it makes it really easy to if I have still the examples over here to have the upper and the lower eyelets or lip match each other so you can very easily create a closed eye shape or even just for the rigors and animators it's very easy to recognize where those need to go as a little tip just like in terms of if you should actually retopologize the model in with closed eyes or open eyes I guess that kind of depends on what is the most like the defaults state of the eyes that you usually see if you see the eyes mostly open and blinking is just like very temporary very short you could just as well retopologize it with open completely open eyes it's fine that can still lead to perfectly fine UV maps shading I guess what I tend to lean towards is actually it's sort of half open eyes but I like to hand over the retopology at the end of it of my task to rigging and animation tests with additional shape keys for open and closed eyes so that there is some more references for the next departments to work on the next people but I am basically running out of time I think so I didn't quite get that far but I hope you can see where I'm sort of going with this there's certain loops that are most important but for example when I would get to the cheek over here I really don't care that much like I think certain areas for the face tend to just be like one big square patch of topology and as long as it has enough resolution to create certain deformations like let's say the character needs a particular shape for puffing their cheeks and you know that they need a lot of the rig needs a lot of control there then you need to add a certain amount of density to that area providing the loops so they can actually control that shape but other than that there's not a particular flow that is necessary here so I just tend to leave it as fairly square fill it in with the rest and be done with it but this is sort of the workflow and I hope that can be sort of recognized in these characters over here in the retopologies if I go into edit mode here you can see the same sort of thing started happening here where you can see which loops were most important where certain features begin need to be accentuated or end and as long as you keep this baseline in mind even if you go a bit too high or a bit too low in topology it doesn't quite matter like it's you can still get a lot out of a out of the retopology as long as the most important features are captured right I would say that would be it then I would I would close it here