New Tool Test "Draw Mesh"

Yes, I am looking for feedbacks. That's ok if you don't have much time. I have had some valuable feedback from you already.

Try this
http://www.digitalfossils.com/Download/NVil-Nov-17-17.rar

The bridge tool is improved. It is now possible to bridge a cross multiple selected lines. It can be useful for long tail like shapes. For detail see the tool tips.

Try this
http://www.digitalfossils.com/Download/NVil-Nov-19-17.rar

The bridge tool is improved again. It can generate mesh connecting to existing mesh on both ends.

I have an idea for another useful feature, something rather sketchy and I think it may be rather hard to implement, but it coud become really handy in some situation. To be more precise. I'm thinking about another kind of curve, the one that would give the ability to change the edge flow inside of the patches. To explain it more throughly, here is the pic:

In my opinion it could be useful in many instances, like generating holes, insets, bevels and it could save quite some time by reducing amount of steps required to reproduce this effects by other means.

I can't see any possible way it can be implemented.

xenoox, can you make a short video to show off you workflow between Retopo and Draw-Mesh tools?

No worries, I understand. I can live without this.

Actually I was thinking about something akin of Data-Driven Interactive Quadrangulation (http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/ddq/), albeit simpler and less automated. 3d coat has this feature already implemented (Quad Paint), but in my opinion it doesn't give results as clean, and well flowing as manual retopolgy. Thats why I was thinking it would be nice to have ability to generate something other than than plain grid when using patches, thus making it easier to retopoligse more complex objects, with least amount of strokes and good edge flow.

About recording the video. If this going to help you, I will record one when I have more time. Although Im quite sure my workflow is nothing special.

Thanks for the info. I still don't know how to implement it.

As for the video, it is not about personnel workflow, it is about the workflow you can achieve in Nvil. It can let others know what the two tools, Retopo and Draw Mesh, can do and the convenience of navigation between the two.

A bug fixing in the bridge tool
http://www.digitalfossils.com/Download/NVil-Nov-23-17.rar

I ran into a problem. When I draw a curve over my current reference mesh, it looks smooth... until I rotate the view which reveals how jagged it is. It's the first time I'm seeing this happening:

Try this
http://www.digitalfossils.com/Download/NVil-Dec-07-17.rar

When finishing spline, the spline will be fully projected onto reference object is Ctrl key is depressed. This is the problem you came across. But maybe sometimes it can be useful, so I added this option. The Draw tooltip is updated.

I see. So the full projection was the default operation for splines in the previous version? Now I'm getting jagged curves only when drawing strokes, but it's limited to areas where the surface has some details.

I have noticed that curves (splines and strokes) are offset a bit from the reference surface in those detailed areas. The more detailed and curved the surface is, the greater the offset. On relatively flat surfaces the offset disappears. Is this normal?

I see. So the full projection was the default operation for splines in the previous version? Now I'm getting jagged curves only when drawing strokes, but it's limited to areas where the surface has some details.

Yes.

I have noticed that curves (splines and strokes) are offset a bit from the reference surface in those detailed areas. The more detailed and curved the surface is, the greater the offset. On relatively flat surfaces the offset disappears. Is this normal?

It is normal. If you want to draw in very detailed area with smooth but small offset lines, Use spline and control the distance between click points depending on the underlying geometry.

I'm sorry IStonia, but this offset is definitely not something one can work with. Take a look at the screenshot #1. It's really huge and the roughness of the stroke is striking. However I did some investigating and it seems that that scaling the imported reference geometry down (and transforming it into position) is the cause of the problem. The greater the scale factor, the bigger the offset between the reference surface and the Draw Mesh curves will be.

To fix it I had to export the scaled-down and properly positioned version of my reference mesh back to .obj file and reimport it (see screenshot #2).

Okay, Common Modeling Shortcut Tools→Freeze Object Scale fixes this too, so no need to reimport the model.

Can you show the result screen shot after scaling frozen? There might be a bug here. What was the value of the scale of the reference object?