• de miscault

  about 1 year ago

  I used retopo flow recently for a full body. I was able to be done with it in less than 4 hours.
  One of the issues is the feedback of the UI. Sometimes it gets stuck for no apparent reason. So I had to restart from scratch. I tried to wait and it came back at some point (less than 15 seconds). I think the UI is too slow. I was working on a nearly 500k face sculpt without any other issue than the slowness. It did happen around 5 to 10 times during the 4 hours of work. It's not clear if it's the tool or me not really using it properly. Overall a very nice adddon.

• Luke Taylor

  over 1 year ago

  Not great to be honest.
  Held back by seemingly self imposed performance issues since typical blender can handle it no problem.
  They themselves recommend not using the tool for >1m poly (High quality proffesional sculpts are often magnitudes higher than this) so it's not really any use for it's actual job. The ideas behind the tools are there but they are a nightmare to use with the extremely poor performance.
  The view port is at 10-20 fps on my 3070ti +16 threaded ryzen when doing retopo on a sculpt that's only 100k let alone 1m. When you come up to 1m the tools are often unresponsive leading to white screen. Polypen is unusable over dense geometry.

  In a perfect world where the suite of tools worked and were responsive I could give this a much higher rating, but as it stands I don't reccomend forking out $60+

• Quentin

  over 1 year ago

  Very nice and streamlined retopology tool when it works. Retopoflow v3.3.0 seems to have worst viewport performance when some tools are selected like stroke, polystrip, patches, and contour compared to Retopoflow v3.2.9. The tool performances itself is alright, not the snappiest on higher retopos for both versions (15k+ triangles on the low poly on my test) so it gets a bit annoying breaking up the low poly mesh into separate objects for good crisp tool performance.

  For reference my high poly mesh was 767k triangles after the decimate. If the better performance of Retopoflow v3.2.9 didn't exist I'd rate 3 stars.

• Nic

  over 1 year ago

  The reviews are so relative here, which I guess is the charm of Blender, depending on the user, configuration, system etc.

  No one belives me that I work on a Mac with no mouse or tablet, only with the trackpad until they see me using the zillion shortcuts:) I will give 5 stars to Retopoflow, it is so elegant and easy to use comparing to the default b3d unintuitive retopology. Sometimes I exit the addon, make some tweaks in edit mode then I return to RFlow and overall I'm more than pleased with this. Expecting the Metal support. Keep it up, guys! Cheers

• Perry Jones

  over 1 year ago

  I'm going to sadly have to give this a 2-star rating. It is indeed a very powerful tool. I was able to get through the bulk of a full body retopo in just a few clicks. However, once the polycount got to 3k faces (6k tris) this addon slows blender down to a crawl. The poor performance renders this powerful tool virtually unusable. For clarity, my source mesh is only 45k polys (90k tris). The target mesh was barely 3.8k polys (7.7k tris). You mean to tell me that this $86 tool can't handle a combined workload of less than 100k? God forbid I pulled in the original 2.4m poly sculpt (5m tris). This would likely crash blender immediately. The tool is still useful, but I have to switch to bSurfaces or shrinkwrapping once the performance becomes too much.

  I tried every trick to increase performance.
  - changing render device in blender settings as well as render properties in my scene
  - I tried hiding parts of the target mesh that I was not currently working on. I tried doing this with RF's built in tools (which are absolutely terrible for hiding geometry), and by hiding the faces in edit mode. Neither of these helped at all.
  - I tried giving blender CPU priority
  - Even tried a fresh install of the latest version of Blender.

  I've done a lot of research on this before posting my review. It seems like this has been a problem for well over a year now. Somehow the terrible performance is just not an issue to the developers. Its unconscionable that they would charge a whopping $86 for this. That price immediately locks out hobbyists. If a hobbyist ever picks this up with the hopes of learning retopology, they are likely to be sorely disappointed. If there were a $15 indie/hobby license I could justify the cost, but as of now I feel like I've wasted almost 90 bucks on a tool I don't think I'll use again.

  The controls/hotkeys are also quite clunky. There's no direct selection tools. Selecting individual vertices, edges, and faces requires that you select certain tools that will allow you to select them. For example, if I need to select just one vertex so that I can move it, I have to use the Knife tool or the PolyPen tool. If I need to select an edge loop I have to swap to the contours tool - despite the fact that this can really disrupt the workflow. You can use the Tweak tool to move individual vertices, but you have to zoom in quite a bit so that the influence doesn't affect surrounding verts.

  The Relax tool is great, but can sometimes be unreliable or unpredictable. It may scrunch verts together for no apparent reason.

  Getting vertices to auto-merge is a nightmare. If you happen to create a quad who's edge is overlapping another quad's edge, they do not merge automatically. You have to swap to a tool that allows you to select edges or vertices and manually move them so that they will snap and merge. This issue is exacerbated by the poor performance as mouse clicks often take 1-2 seconds to fully register. Rotating the viewport is incredibly laggy and takes 1-2 seconds to register. Sometimes the view will flip completely forcing you to reposition your view - which is quite painful with the slowness I've been experiencing.

  The Loops tool and making loop cuts isn't always super smart. It sometimes won't make loop cuts in the ways that you might expect. The Patches tool won't let you bridge two edges if they aren't nearly parallel. Like if one edge is at a 45 degree angle and the other is at a 90 degree angle, it will refuse to let you patch.

  Overall this was a huge headache to use. Yes it took less time than bSurfaces, but once I got closer to the end of retopo effort, it started to feel a lot like I was using bSurfaces. Which makes me wonder --- why did I spend $86 to do what I was already doing for free.

  Truly disappointed in this addon and hope the devs fix the poor performances. I can honestly deal with all of the other issues if the addon didn't run like dog water.

• Niklas

  over 1 year ago

  It's a joy to use, doing retopology with retopoflow with the polypen feels like putting together a puzzle, it makes it easy to understand were to connect the faces

  The relax and tweak tools are doing a great job at smoothing out the edge loops

  loops tool is easy and fast to use together with the poly pen

  haven't really used strokes that much yet but it was easy to use and modify

  Haven't have any need for patches yet but, when im more comfortable with my retopolo i might be able to fill holes much faster.

  I've wanted to use contours but it crashes blender everytime i try to use it, using polystrips instead right now for the neck, but it would be very useful to know what causes the crashes because i would really need the contours tool for the arms and fingers.

• John Petersen

  over 1 year ago

  30 hours and $86 wasted, I have tested it over and over again and there are so many issue with this, that I will not recommend the addon .
  In Fact it is so useless that I actually could give up blender.
  Here is a small list of problems:
  Exit retopoflow then you must not do anything in blender, such as going into object mode and back into edit mode, because then retopoflow does not work, you cannot work with it any more and you can also risk the top menu in blender disappearing.
  Bad symmetry, when you start, you have to be sure that you start on the correct side, because otherwise you have bad symmetry and a message pops up with this, but nothing about how to fix this.
  Other things are difficult to do, where vanilla blender is better and faster for the task, but you can't exit retopoflow and do these things in blender, because then retopoflow won't work

• 

  Orange Turbine

  over 1 year ago

  Hi there, if you have any issues or questions about how to use the tool, please let us know! If, for whatever reason, we can't fix it quickly, we can give you a refund. This review is the first time we've heard of the menu disappearing. My bet would be that the add-on was enabled via preferences but accidentally disabled in the workspace via the Filter Addons option in the sidebar.
• Marius

  over 1 year ago

  Tools work great on my PC at home, so I decided to get this version to support developement and to be able to use my work professionally.
  I work on an Apple Silicon Mac though, not a windows PC like at home, which came with an unexpected issue: Retopoflow currently uses OpenGL and doesnt support Metal(which makes sense for now seeing as Metal is fairly new to Blender).

  Currently you have to go into your blender settings under System and switch the GPU Backend from Metal to OpenGL to get the addon working on Apple Silicon Macs. Depending on your scene, this can drastically increase render times, reduce viewport performance etc.
  Will probably rate 5 stars once you (hopefully) patch in support for the Metal GPU Backend on MacOS. The tools are great, but I can't give 5 stars when I pay for pro level use and I'm forced to handicap my system to accomodate the addon.

• mat

  over 1 year ago

  It has cool tools and potential but it's completely unusable due to performance issues. It's just terribly slow and laggy

• Appgamedo

  almost 2 years ago

  10 star

• Displaying ratings 21-30 of 177 in total

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