• funksy

  over 4 years ago

  This review is for 3.00 Beta only. Retopoflow has been in 3.00 Beta stage for several months now and there has been no updates or communication on the progress from the developers. I'm starting to think there are some bigger issues with the development of this addon.

  The tools work great, aside from some occasional and relatively minor usability issues.

  The UI however is horrendous at the moment. It's sluggish and unresponsive and as other reviewers have pointed out, you can't even change values in input fields in the Options menu without losing you mind. The dropdown menus are slow to open and sometimes it takes several clicks to open them. Same with the Tools menu. Quickly switching between the tools with a mouse is painful since it doesn't always register the mouse click. For fast retopoing the UI really needs to be way snappier.

  I really love this addon and its incredibly versatile and intuitive tool set, but the UI performance needs to improve. I personally consider this addon unusable in its current state. I will reconsider my rating if and when these issues are fixed.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  over 4 years ago

  Thanks for the honest review! We've addressed several of the UI slowdowns in RetopoFlow 3.0 Beta 2, and are working to fix the last lingering one before release. If there are any other issues you run into, please let us know!
• Pirri66

  over 4 years ago

  $86 for what, if I could, would I reverse the purchase!
  Same as "Steve White"
  --- I bought this the other day and frankly, I can't get much of anything to work. The interface it opens seems super sluggish, I can't highlight text fields to change values, can't rotate around the model, it crashes constantly... Its really not intuitive at all. Any ETA on when this might get fixed and updated? I don't mind paying for an addon, I like supporting developers but this isn't what I expected.---

• 

  Orange Turbine

  over 4 years ago

  You can! There's a full refund policy. Please let us know whenever you find bugs via the support inbox or email us at retopoflow@cgcookie.com - that way we can be sure to fix them.
• Steve White

  over 4 years ago

  I bought this the other day and frankly, I can't get much of anything to work. The interface it opens seems super sluggish, I can't highlight text fields to change values, can't rotate around the model, it crashes constantly... Its really not intuitive at all. Any ETA on when this might get fixed and updated? I don't mind paying for an addon, I like supporting developers but this isn't what I expected.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  over 4 years ago

  Hi Steve, we've pushed out several bug fixes since then and have more on the way. Please let us know via the support inbox if you have any issues! The faster we know about them the faster we can solve them.
• Hedrus

  over 4 years ago

  So far so good. I am using 3.0 which isn't finished. The tools and documentation are great. I think there are things that could be improved but overall it's a really nice tool. I had no trouble installing it or using it. I would love to give ideas on ways to improve it. A Discord channel or something similar would be great.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  over 4 years ago

  We now have a Twitter account! Feel free to reach out to us on there, or email us at retopoflow@cgcookie.com with feedback.
• killerferret

  almost 5 years ago

  Add-ons are suppose to make your life easier, not more frustrating. Everytime I try to run Retopoflow, it either locks up blender or wont allow me to rotate around my model. When I try to update Retopoflow, thinking that will fix something, the addon is nowhere to be found and therefore unusable. Its a constant, unnecessary battle that isn't worth the trouble.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  Hi, thank you for letting us know! If you contact our support we're happy to help resolve any issues or help diagnose any bugs you're experiencing. That way we can make sure it runs smoothly for everyone before 3.0 is out of beta.
• fadi

  almost 5 years ago

  it has potential! but the developers just need to put some actual work into this thing. The intention is good but the foundation is not solid. I have had a terrible time trying to even get the add on to work. Half the times i get an error or it just doesn't install the add-on, and the other half was just errors trying to enable it. there used to be a documentation tab but it is a 404. Tried to find a way to contact the developer to get "support" i didn't find a single way of communication. looked for a discord or any tutorial to help troubleshoot this but i think the devs don't think that such problems would arise, so a setup guide is no where to be found in form of a read me or text document in the add-on folder. after finally figuring it out and getting the add-on to work, all the guides and pop ups came after launching the add-on, but just prior to that you are on your own pal.the add-on works on blender 2.82 !!!! so that's good news. you'd think that once you have it up and running it would be smooth sailing from here, NO! it is not! it feels like the same frustration that came out of blender 2.79 version. immediate reduction in performance, it is sluggish and choppy. simply put you have to carefully follow a guide or a tutorial, because you have to either use contours or polybuild beforehand, the polypen is just not an option. Yet, trying to use the polybuild you have to find a good stretch of geo to drag a stroke on it or else good luck getting any quads applied. The way that this add-on is coded it just doesn't handle trying to jump between the retopo options fast enough, and for that reason you have to go really slow, This just simply defeats the purpose. at its price point, you are either taking a laugh at people or just trying to upsell an unfinished product.
  My suggestion:
  most of what you are trying to get done in blender can be done manually but either takes longer time or more key strokes, the purpose of an add-on is to simplify the process and make it easier so:
  - get rid of that awful overlay, just disabling the views of other tabs and constricting you to just a slow software is not the way to do it, just bring it back to something that sticks to the side panels.
  - add documentation, remapping of hotkeys, and other customization of the UI elements to the add-on tab just like any other professional add-on.
  - add a hotkey that align selected edges to the X axis. having to drag them into place and not seeing them snap just feels sluggish, so try to improve on merging and snapping and clipping.
  - maybe some buttons to toggle between view port visibility (in front), wireframe and back face culling if you are gonna keep an overlay that restricts you from clicking anything other than the add-on's tabs.
  Long story short you have to find common grounds between the users, make the add-on flexible.
  Retopology was never fun, it is will also always be a fine line to cross while to deliver on such a topic, but the main tipping point is that this is up for 86$ on a free open source software. most other great add-ons are at half this price range or are free with the option to support the devs. if this stays like this for long you are better off with speedretopo or using Bsurfaces for retopo, at least you'll be in full control.
  i got this add-on to help my workflow but instead it became an obstacle..

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  Hey Fadi, I appreciate you taking the time to leave a thorough review. We don't have a Discord, but you can always reach us directly from any product page (on the right hand side under the info), from our GitHub repository, or from emailing us directly at retopoflow@cgcookie.com.

  We have had a few reports of sluggish behavior in the 3.0 Beta. Most of the issues were fixed from the jump from Alpha to Beta, but we still have a few to investigate before releasing 3.0. This is still beta software, so some bugs are to be expected. The faster we learn about them the faster we can fix them!

  Thank you for letting us know your preferences. We definitely aim to make retopology fun, and with the bug reports and requests from users like yourself, I'm confident we can get there.
• Arafat Khaskheli

  almost 5 years ago

  I love this product and it is really making my work easy. Sadly it starts to bog down and now freezes the application altogether when I am so close to finishing my work. I hope the creators will fix this soon.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  Hey Arafat, thanks for the love! If you find RetopoFlow to be too slow, please send us a support email so that we can help diagnose the issue and fix any bugs we haven't seen yet.
• Coverop

  almost 5 years ago

  The addon is great, but you'll need to wait till they fix several glitches and performance issues to fully utilize It in your normal projects otherwise, you'll get angry.

  The addon is really user-friendly, despite Its complexity.
  Find the right tool for right moment and It can solve your problem in the blink of an eye!

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  I'm so glad you find the tools helpful! If you're able to reproduce any of the bugs, please send us a support email with the details so that we can fix them faster! The recently released Beta should be much improved, and we'll have a full release ready soon.
• Jacob

  almost 5 years ago

  Stay away from the addon if you are using 2.8x. The addon is completely broken. I was focusing on the face retopology, When I finish the face, I notice that it completely destroyed the rest of the body retopology in the worst possible way. 2 Days of retopology work trashed... At least I done the face [Crying blood right now]. It just took me 1 hour after buying it to regret.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  Hey Jacob, thanks for the feedback! We've since released an update from Alpha to Beta which has fixed a slew of bugs, and we'll be ready for a full release shortly. If you have any specific bugs to report, please send us a support message with the details so we can fix it faster.
• lks

  almost 5 years ago

  Edit:
  Hey, so in RetopoFlow 3 y'all addressed basically every problem I had and more!
  I'd be game to change my review to 5stars with a "works great, 5 stars" type review hahaha

  Previous review:
  This review is specifically for the "RetopoFlow V3.00.0 Alpha". I attempted to contact the creators a week ago and again today but seems they haven't had a chance to respond, and I know the Blender2.8.1 implementation of this tool is still in alpha, so this review will definitely get reconsidered when the bugs are fixed. Also, if you're using Blender 2.7, please ignore this review as it does not apply.

  For anyone who uses Blender 2.8+, just know that at present, this plugin is basically broken. I bought it for full price and it's pretty much unusable right now. There are a number of game breaking bugs which I'll list below, and I would report them to github but the link a previous reviewer was given is now a 404, so I'm not really sure how to officially report these bugs.

  1) SpeedRetopo hijacks your currently centered blender viewport and enters some kind of SR context, which is fine (though it's too bad it doesn't just work in your existing viewport) except for the fact that entering and exiting the SR context successively results in a number of cumulative runtime inconsistencies.

  2) SR clobbers a number of your custom Blender hotkeys (I would imagine this is necessary) but it incompletely clobbers the blender hotkeys, meaning that some keys mapped to other blender actions will interfere with SpeedRetopo. For example, I have the "F" key in Blender mapped to "center camera on object". SpeedRetopo attempts to clobber this key binding for its own purposes, but fails somehow and so it becomes impossible to use whatever tool is mapped to "F" within SpeedRetopo (I think the quad fill tool is broken by my hotkey binding). SR also does not have remappable hotkeys internally, so you can't work around the conflict by changing SR's hotkeys to some other shift+alt command.

  3) SpeedRetopo rescales your source and target mesh object when you enter its context. It does not revert the scale when you leave the context, so I manually have to reset my scale transform back to "1" in order to put my objects back to their original positions after using SR.

  4) SpeedRetopo attempts to set your camera clipping planes to the size of your retopo object. Sadly there seems to be conditions which will make this action fail and set your clipping planes outside your scene objects, meaning that you'll just have a blank 3d view. Also, like the scale, SpeedRetopo does not set your clipping planes back to what they were before entering the tool, so it permanently messes up your 3dview camera with each use.

  5) SpeedRetopo does not currently seem to play nice with "isolate selected object" view. I'm not quite sure what the bugs are, but I have noticed additional weirdness when using this to retopo specific meshes in my scene.

  6) For some reason, opening the documentation and hotkey reference windows within SpeedRetopo tanks your framerate.

  I have tested these bugs in vanilla blender 2.8, so I'm certain it's not my custom setup causing the issues.

  In any case, I'm sure this will become an awesome tool when it leaves Alpha! Please give me a shout when there is a new version release and I'll reconsider this one-star. But yeah, currently, since I basically can't use the tool for work because of the compound effect of all these behaviors, I can't reasonably give V3.00.0 alpha a good review.

• 

  Orange Turbine

  almost 5 years ago

  Hi there, thank you for the review and feedback. The detailed description of each issue is very helpful and so I'd like to address each one in the same order you wrote.

  1 ) The dedicated RetopoFlow mode is a bit of a blessing and a curse. On one hand it gives us far more control over mesh display, snapping, etc, but it also presents some workflow inconveniences. We are hoping to revisit this after the official 3.0 release to see if we can make RetopoFlow work in a more native environment (this was not really possible before 2.8x).

  2 ) This is a known issue and something we have on our agenda to fix after the 3.0.0 release. Specifically we intend to integrate RetopoFlow directly into Blender's native hotkey system so that hotkeys are more flexible. There's a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow/issues/718

  3 ) This bug has been fixed. A new "beta" will be sent out any day.

  4 ) You've identified one of the most difficult and frustrating requirements for RetopoFlow. Due to the way surface snapping and selection works we have to ensure the Clip Start/End are adequate for the given models. In order to prevent constant artist frustration from not having good start/end settings we attempt to automatically set these based on the given models but like most things, it's an imperfect system. We don't have a good answer to this but are constantly trying to improve it.

  However, we've not seen the specific issue you're describing. If you're able to send a .blend file to retopoflow@cgcookie.com that would help us narrow it down!

  5 ) Unfortunately this is a limitation of Blender. What you can do instead is Hide unnecessary objects. SHIFT+H will hide all but your current selection.

  6 ) The UI performance has been dramatically improved in recent changes and will be sent out in the upcoming beta!

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