Transcription
Hello, here's every Quad Tool setting explained. Make sure you download these to support your retopology ventures. Like this, so you can come back to it later and enjoy the [Music] video.
So first and foremost, we're going to go through all the key bindings for this. You need a guide or a GPU cache. So if you want to learn how to do that, there'll be links in the video description below.
Activate a live surface with this magnet. Come up here to the Modeling Toolkit and then we're going to activate Quad Draw. A normal click is going to add a vertex. You can also use middle mouse click to draw a vertex. Right click is going to be your usual menu functions. Once these are placed, you can click and drag these anywhere, and the same with anything that you've already drawn.
To fill in a polygon, you first need four points. Hold Shift is going to bring up this green icon that basically indicates where you can draw in a quad. You can connect two edges together, 'cause fundamentally there are four points here. Hovering over a face with a click allows you to move the face and all the points. Hovering over an edge allows you to move the edge.
Control and Shift brings up this yellow icon. You can click to delete a face, click to delete an edge, or click to delete a point. Be careful when you delete an edge because it's going to lead up the entire loop and could leave you with some nasty end-gon. If you don't want that to happen, just delete a face up the chain and it's going to stop the edge loop.
If you like, and I don't really suggest that, you can hold Tab and that's going to draw a line of quads. To change the size of the quads, you can go down to Quad Strip Width. This can get a bit messy, so I honestly wouldn't use it. With topology, you want to be a bit more tactical with each one of your placements. If you hold Tab and middle mouse click, that can also change the size of your strips.
You can move faces, edges, and vertices, but that would take a long time with a face like this. Instead, what you can do is press B. That's going to bring up the soft selection mode. You can see it drags a radius with the colored dots that are on the screen. You can increase the radius by holding B and then scrolling left to right. You can make this quite large to do major changes. Also, it's a good way to make sure your mesh is sticking to the guide, 'cause every single active point that's touched is basically going to snap there.
You can change these soft selection settings by coming into Soft Selection here. Volume is going to look at all the geometry, so even if you have floating objects. Surface is going to look at the adjacent faces. Global is going to affect everything it sees in the scene, and Objects is going to stay to the one that you have selected. You can also change the falloff by clicking here. Say, for example, you want a very tight pin of a selection, you can just click and drag, and you can see what that pin effect is having. You can see the effect it's having here. I'm not really sure why you'd want that. So if you don't, you can just come to Reset Curve.
If you hold Control, it's going to insert a loop, which highlights the importance of having good quad geometry on a face. Click once to insert a, or you could middle mouse click. That's going to put it 50% between the edges.
So this leads us on nicely to welding. So whenever you connect a point, you can just click and drag it. They're going to stick together, and the same is true with the edges. They're just going to snap. So that's good if you want additional geometry and don't necessarily want it to lead elsewhere. You can just snap areas together and then delete the loop with Control and Shift.
You can change how aggressive or magnetic that snapping is. If you go down to Auto Welding, you can change this slider. When you've inserted new geometry and you hold Shift, it's going to relax the rest of the surrounding geometry. Really good idea to use this in combination with soft selection. So pressing B, and that's going to generically soften all the surrounding places. You can change the relax settings down here under Relax. I would keep it as Auto Lock. Very rarely you would come out of that. Some of its features, if I'm smoothing here, you see that the borders aren't moving. So under the Relax options, it's using interior vertices. When my cursor is on the border vertices and I start to relax, you'll see the interior ones are protected, and that's under Border Vertices. Very specific situations. So Auto Lock is going to use the right feature depending on where your cursor starts, but if for some reason it's not working, you can use those separately.
If you want to continue or extrude faces, you can hold Tab, go over an edge, and then extrude it. If you have quite a major edge loop, you can hold Tab and middle mouse click, and that's going to extend an entire loop. Again, my suggestion isn't to use something like this. My suggestion isn't to use this too often 'cause it can be quite chaotic. Ideally, you want to be more tactical. My most common edge tool is just extruding, and by far my favorite is just holding Tab and extruding over a vertex, and that's going to draw out each individual quad. The Extend drop-down is just for manual selection of those features, or you could just use the hotkeys.
When you are doing quad drawing and dating around the place, you might accidentally have some stray dots here. You can delete them one at a time by holding Control and Shift and just clicking them, but thankfully there is an option down here called Clear Dots. Down here, you can come to Clear Dots, and that's basically going to clear all the active points that aren't assigned to a quad.
While you are holding Shift and relaxing, you might accidentally hit a vertex that you don't want to. So if you want to be more specific about it, hold Shift, middle mouse click, and then scroll side to side. That's going to tactically relax the area that your cursor was on top of. So you can do that with edges, vertices, and also faces.
If you want to make a major reconstruction, you can just click each one individually. A quicker option would be to hold Control and Shift, click and hold, and then you can highlight the areas that you want to delete. So it could be that you don't like the density of the edges down here. If you hold Control and Shift, that's going to highlight an edge loop. Hold middle mouse button, and now you can move this edge loop, and as you see it starts to snap away. It's definitely a cool trick, but my suggestion would be not to really use it that much 'cause it's going to cause chaos down the line. For example, here we've already got some errors.
And to link those all together, if you hold Control, Shift, and right-click, that's going to give all your options that we went through: Clear Dots, your Auto Weld, the Relax features that you should really stick with Auto Lock, and Extend with Edge Bard and Loop, but we've already got hotkeys for those. So if you ever do forget, it's nice to have quick access there.
Snap to Back Face is going to be very useful. So if you imagine you're retopologizing some cloth, you don't accidentally want the points to go to the side that you're not looking at, or namely the back face.
We also have some live constraint options. So you can turn off the wireframe, or get rid of the mesh color, change the opacity of the faces or the alpha, and also customize it to your preferences by just changing colors here.
We also have the option of Surface Offset. So a high offset means that whenever you click on an active point, it's going to hover slightly over your guide. So that can be useful if it's intersecting a bit too much, or you're doing an extreme low poly. For example, we're now not getting clipping here with this low poly piece. I wouldn't suggest it for game assets 'cause your high poly and your low poly are going to be misaligned. It's going to cause problems when it comes to baking, but sometimes artists like to use that. And before they export, just turn it down to zero, smooth the mesh, and it's going to snap back, and you can see the vertices are lying flush against the guide.
And Snap to Back Face, which we've covered. If you want to understand a little bit more of it, I suggest moving on to Quad Mistakes, where we use Snap to Back Face to fix certain things, especially with cloth. I'll also link videos on how to retopologize things like a hand. There are also videos for common misconceptions when it comes to hard surface topology, and especially quad drawing.
So if you got even one piece of information out of that, maybe it was an a strange hotkey you never heard of before, make sure you like the video and also subscribe 'cause I'm going to be releasing more retopology and quad content. There's also the 3D Mutiny Discord channel where we battle through retopology, and an email list where I send out private videos and free base meshes. So thanks for watching, and I'll catch you on the next one.