I've managed to finally play with this feature.

I think it works pretty well overall.

I have a few issues thus far and they are:

-1. From help:
Temporarily disable snapping
Hold Ctrl and click to disable automatically snapping to existing points.
I don't think I get this feature. In what context does this work? I couldn't see anything going on, neither when creating geometry nor when moving points around.

-2. Speaking of moving points around… right now there's the brush that deals with this, however it's a type of nudge/smear interaction, as it drops a point after a while and picks up another as the brush goes over it.
We need a true move option for points, i.e. once a point (or a few, depending on the brush size and point proximity) is picked up, don't drop it or pick others until LMB release.
I hope there's this option already and I've missed it, otherwise it's the first thing that needs to be implemented when you touch this node again. Moving points to adjust topology after you created it is crucial.

-3. Selecting point/edges is far from optimal right now (click, Esc). There's however an easier way - just hold Shift even when selecting the first point/edge. Maybe the help file should be updated to say that instead of the inefficient click, Esc.

-4. Deleting edges: right now if I want to delete an edge (1), I get rid of its adjacent points as well (3) and there's no way to delete a poly (2) is there?
Now, sometimes you need the (2) result, other times the (3), but to have this freedom of choice one needs either the possibility to select polys to delete them (preferable option) or to delete an edge w/o its adjacent points.

Hi there,

you can delete polys by using the shift-select method on a polygonal face (just make sure you've cleared the selection before, you can use the middle mouse to clear the selection too) Then you can delete it.

The disable snapping feature is truly a mystery, I couldn't get any joy out of that either, but at least the points have stopped snapping through to the other side of the geometry when you move them (although they still snap through when you're creating a point, think I'll be submitting that one).

I'm loving the brush mode, and I tend to prefer that for the purpose of tweaking topology, where you're unlikely to ever to want to drag points across their neighbours. But then these things are always a matter of taste

friedasparagus
Hi there,

you can delete polys by using the shift-select method on a polygonal face (just make sure you've cleared the selection before, you can use the middle mouse to clear the selection too) Then you can delete it.

Hi friedasparagus, thanks for the delete poly tip, I've managed to miss that somehow.

friedasparagus
The disable snapping feature is truly a mystery, I couldn't get any joy out of that either, but at least the points have stopped snapping through to the other side of the geometry when you move them (although they still snap through when you're creating a point, think I'll be submitting that one).

Maybe someone will shed some light on this.

friedasparagus
I'm loving the brush mode, and I tend to prefer that for the purpose of tweaking topology, where you're unlikely to ever to want to drag points across their neighbours. But then these things are always a matter of taste

I don't think I understand your point here. Both have their place, one tool for adjusting big areas of geometry loosely and the other for moving points or group of points in a precise manner. If one prefers to use the “loose” brush for point position tweaking, then sure, use w/e you like. I for one need and use both in other packages.

ANother issue I've found is that drawing an edge will not close off a polygon. If the created edge's adjacent poly is a quad or triangle I think it should automatically be closed.
Will submit a RFE for this too.

Things start to pile up. I'll no longer post here, I'll just submit RFEs.

I'm thinking opening another thread for this is not worth it so I'll just post here:
I'm in the process of finishing a retopo for a monster I'm sculpting in Zb and my initial feedback is that the TopoBuild is slow. Slow in both performance - it feels lagging in interaction - as well as the workflow.

The first issue - interaction - is a matter of pure programming so there's nothing I can add to this.
Regarding the 2nd, I've already filed a bunch of RFEs so I guess I'll have to wait and see if and how many will see the light. Right now it took me to do as far as I did probably more than it would have taken me to do it directly in Zb (manually of course, not Zremesher) and in case you're not familiar with Zbrush's manual retopo, let me tell you that it's bad.
Houdini doesn't suffer from the same issues, it's something I can't put my finger on it, but I'll probably be able to figure it out when and if those RFEs will be implemented and see if the slow work speed persists.

On a related note: there's a lot of potential here. I chose to test the TopoBuild not only to see how well it performs (not exemplary so far), but to see how well would Houdini fit into a non-linear workflow that involves sculpting a model in Zb on a “messy” mesh, retopo part of it in Houdini, pose it with the traditional tools - bones and skin - send back to Zb to continue sculpting, exporting another pose from H to use it within Zb as layer pose and so on. Zbrush's posing tools are rather limited, useful in some non-demanding situations, although not holding a candle to a trad. system.


So far, ignoring a few hiccups due to my cumbersomeness with H and the fact that Houdini needs a few major improvements regarding skinning, the tests have gone very well. Houdini's procedural nature shines again. When topobuild and skinning will be sorted out, this will be a huge asset for any artist that has it in their toolbag.

Hi guys - regarding the mystery around disable snapping, that is for situations where you have a few polys you're extruding and because of their proximity to other polys/points let's say, sometimes they just snap to areas where you don't want them to. So instead of having to strategically move and maybe scale that group of polys (or even delete some accidental triangles), you can just disable the snapping until you drag them to the area where you want to plop them into. I can do a short vid if that helps..

And as for closing that quad in your image, McNistor, I would suggest grabbing the fat end of the gap (that edge) and extruding a poly outwards to close it off.

And yes, I'm using also SHIFT to select geo as well..

Hi fianna,
I know what the snapping would be good for, it's just that it was broken in build .480 and wasn't doing anything upon pressing ctrl. It's now fixed.

I also know how to close the quad in the image but I'm arguing that it should close automatically. I mean having a toggle for this, because there are cases where you don't want auto-close.