Planning the topology - MODO Tutorial

- [Instructor] Once your prototype mesh has been given the go ahead, it's time to then build the final production mesh. And the good news is that all the work that you've put in to creating this prototype mesh is not going to be wasted. In fact, it's going to be the foundation upon which you build the final asset. And one of the benefits of using this two stage approach is that you no longer need to worry about the form of the model because that has now been established, which means that the only thing you really need to worry about at this stage of the process is the topology. You can focus all of your attention on that alone. So we'll begin by taking a look at the sole. Now you might remember that we actually have two versions of this asset, one which is slightly shorter than the other. And the reason I've done it this way is because once I've created the final version of the sole, all this tread detail will need to be beveled out. And in order to be able to do that I'm going to need to start from a shorter version of the mesh which I have here. But I also intend to use the projected texture as a typology guide. And as you can see, this shorter version of the mesh does not have the texture projected on it at the moment. And this means that I'm going to need to transfer both the UVs and the texture from this other mesh. And the UVs are going to have to be absolutely identical for the projected texture to transfer across. But luckily that's very easy to do. Let's start by opening a UV window here on the left and I'm going to need to create a new UV map on this mesh so where it says UV none here at the top I'm going to select New and let's just select the default name of texture and we're good to go. Then I'm going to head over to the item list and holding control I'm going to select the other sole mesh so that we have both of them selected and then I'm going to enter into polygon mode. Just going to rotate my open glViewport just so I can see the front of the shoe a bit more clearly, then I'll head over to the tools panel and switch to the UV tools. Then I need to select two polygons on each mesh and they need to be the same two corresponding polygons on each mesh. And the first mesh that I make selection on has to be the mesh that I'm transferring the UV coordinates from. So I'm going to select two polygons on this mesh with the lower sole and holding shift, I'm then going to select the exact same two polygons on the other mesh. Then I'm going to come over to the UV tools and I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of the panel to locate this button which is labeled transfer UV positions and I'm going to click it. once I've done that, I can de-select the original mesh and you can see that the UVs have been assigned to the other mesh. So now, both of these meshes have the exact same UV map. So if I now select the shorter of the two measures and I hit the M key to bring up the polygon set material dialogue and I select the sole material from the list and click OK, you can see that the texture is applied perfectly. And I can now close the UV window and we can take a look at how we're going to retopologize this model. And I'll now switch to the topology tab which holds a set of tools which are specifically designed for retopologizing existing forms. So any tool that I use here will automatically conform to the background meshes. So I'll start by hiding the shoe because we want to concentrate on the sole, and I need to start planning how I'm going to create the new topology for this form. And there are two principles that are going to guide me here. First of all, I need to try and keep the new topology as light as possible. That essentially means drawing as few polygons as I can get away with in order to define the form correctly. And secondly, I'm going to try and keep the flow of the new polygons as smooth as possible. That means the new topology is going to have to follow these forms that are defined by the texture. And in order to make this whole process a bit smoother, we'll need to set up some specific visibility options in the viewport. So, in order to get started, I'm going to change into the bottom view. When you're doing retopology, it's generally better to do it in an orthographic view because it means the projections are going to be more accurate and I'll head over to the item list and hit the N key to create a new empty mesh item which I'm going to name sole topology. Making sure I'm in polygon mode, I'm going to activate the pen tool in the topology tools and I'm going to draw a quod polygon. So let's do that now. Define four corners of this quod and once I'm happy with its shape, I'll hit Q to drop the pen tool. And if I return to the perspective view, we should just about be able to see that this new polygon conforms to the shape of the background mesh behind it. But as you can see, it's quite hard to see what's going on with the default visibility options. So I'm going to make a few changes. I'll click on this cog icon here at the top right of the viewport to open the viewport properties and I'm just going to drag the panel in order to pin it. Then I'll click on the active meshes tab and I'm going to set the transparency mode to ghost. Then I'm going to click on the inactive meshes tablet just shifts the view point so we can see the area of interest a bit more clearly. And to start with, I'm going to uncheck this option to make inactive the same as active. I'm going to set the shading style to default. Then I'm also going to set the transparency mode to ghost. And as you can see that makes everything much easier to see. I can clearly see the texture on the mesh. However, I still want to hide the wire frame in the background mesh because that's a little bit distracting. So I come to the wireframe overlay and I'm going to set that to none. Then I can dismiss the viewport properties popover and I'm going to use the control+1 Pie Menu to toggle off the visibility of the grid and the work plane. And now my view is much less cluttered and I can see far more clearly. And I can now use the topology tools to retopologize this shape, which we'll start doing in the next video.