Introduction
In this lesson, we will be creating a mesh using the quad draw tool that conforms and has clean and evenly spaced topology.
What Does the Quad Draw Tool do?
The Quad Draw tool is used for manually creating low poly meshes that are easy to deform and and cut out from the rest of a high density mesh – this is especially useful for animating specific features on a model such as the eyes or mouth on a face. The different polygons selected with the quad draw tool can be combined or separated to create clear and distinct areas of polygons to manipulate.
Retopologizing
The quad draw tool is used for retopology. Retopology is the process of refining an existing mesh to have the most optimal topology – the structure of the polygons and their individual edges, faces and vertices is edited. Retopology is used in 3D animation for creating a clean mesh for models that is based on using quad polygons rather than ‘tris’ (triangular polygons). A retopologized mesh means that animators can deform it in the animating process cleanly, and being uniform means that the animator can animate each part of the mesh in the same way.
Retopologized meshes are often much lower poly than a sculpted mesh.
Using the Quad Draw Tool
To use the quad draw tool to retopologize the mesh on a sculpted 3d face, I started by selecting the mesh and activating symmetry by pressing the Q key and clicking in the scene. Doing this would replicate what I drew with the quad draw tool on either side of the face.
Next, I clicked the right-most magnet at the top of the scene window.
To start using quad draw, I went to the mesh tools menu and selected ‘quad draw tool’
To use the quad draw tool, you can click to create a vertex. Every 4 vertices creates a quad polygon if you hold shift and click inside of the 4 vertices.
Verts can be dragged around to create a uniform mesh.
Here is a basic retopology guide I followed when selecting which areas to retopologize with which number of quads.
These are some screenshots of the retopology work that I did today.
