Retopology in a few seconds - instant mesh 

My obj isn't showing up on instant meshes at all, do you know what the problem might be?

Thanks for all your videos Grant, you're easily my favourite blender youtuber and i've learnt so much via your videos, as you don't lock anything behind a gumroad/patreon paywall!

Grant, This is priceless! I'm an old LIghtwave user and am finding all this addons and helpful software quite mindblowing. I completed a 4 minute cartoon a few years ago which took me 5 years including music score, but with this new software it would be a fraction of the time. I feel like a baby in a candy store especially with all your free tuts, and by the way you deserve that 100k award! Just amazing how you fit it all in. Thank You, all this is so helpfull with my new project in Blender.

I love it when I'm watching a video to learn one thing, and then learn other techniques in the process. I had no idea about the Clear Sharp feature and now want to go back to some of my models and try it out. Thanks yet again!

I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT THISSS!!!! Kudos to you and a HUGE thanks for creating IM!!

Seems pretty useful, I've seen it before but never bothered with it but after watching this I ended up downloading it to try it out. Thanks!

5:30 - 'Clear Sharp' to smooth out the mesh... THANK YOU!

Thank you so much for this video Grant, I learned so much from you over the last couple of months. Your tutorials helped me a lot in getting better in Blender. I didn't publish all my projects on my youtube channel yet, but maybe you can see the influence in some of my work already :-D

If Grant Abbit recommended, then it is worth trying.

I love this tutorial. Wow, it is very insightful.

Thank you for making this video! Super helpful!

I expect this process would be even more effective if you separate your model into smaller meshes first (eg: helmet, pauldrons, belt, sandals and body) and then merge them back together. I’ve always found retopologising to be the most tedious part of the process, so I’m definitely going to have a play with this.

Wow, this worked great! Thanks!

Instant Mesh can be a life saver! What I love about it the best is that it is also built into 3d_Coat as an extra re-topo option :O and since I use my Blender->3D-Coat link all the time anyway it just works out fantastically. It is, though, absolutely great to see the developers have made such a great littel tool directly available as well!

Great tutorial Grant! thanks

One more tip for using Instant Mesh: If you're running on a multi-core CPU, take advantage of it. You can get a significant speed boost in activities that can be parallelised, e.g. solving operations. Just start from the command line or a desktop shortcut/launcher and using the command: Instant Mesh --threads n (or Windows equivalent) Where n is number of threads your CPU can spawn, e.g. on a hexacore Ryzen CPU, you have 6 physical and 12 logical cores available, so use them. Cheers

this is awesome, thank you

Thanks, Grant. Very nice video. I assume that one day (I don't know how long we'll need to wait) AI will take care of retopo with one click. :-)

If I wasnt already subscribed, this video would make me subscribe Fortunately I found you in another video and RU-vid recommended this for me. THANK YOU!

WOW, Your my God,You save my life and time,Thank you so mush

Thanks for this. Appears to be far superior to blenders decimate tool that I always use.

Just suscribed! Thank you for this!!!

At one point in the video you [Grant Abbitt] mention that switching between the "comb" mode and the model rotate mode requires a workflow-interrupting mouse-click action. Having used this tool in anger, I wholeheartedly agree. If you want to change this default behaviour, simply download the source and amend the viewer.cpp file to add the following at the end of the if-then-else conditional, in the Viewer::keyboardEvent function: } else if (key == ' ') { mOrientationComb->setPushed(!mOrientationComb->pushed()); } Then recompile. This allows you to toggle comb mode on/off via the space bar. It's really easy if you're a linux user and are used to compiling from make files - just import into your favourite IDE or directly edit the viewer.cpp file, then build using make or your IDE. Cheers

bless you sir

Is anybody else having problems launching the windows version of Instant Meshes? It crashes at launch for me. (standard Win10 setup)

I downloaded both Instand Meshes and Dataset, but when I try to open dataset, it just give me errors: (linker error: Mesh_shader 63), it crashes and I have to close the program.

thank you!

Grant, you have saved my bacon yet again. In fact, over the past few months, you have saved enough bacon for me to make a small pig. Greasy thanks!

Thank you so much! I really REALLY! hate the idea of manual Retopology lol

I will try this for retopologying my sculpted rock

Thank you Sir :)

Thank You so much!!

Edit: I said this before seeing the clear sharp thing at the end :) thank you Original comment: But for some reason when putting it into blender, when I try to bake a normal with the higher poly one over this one it makes the normal map have a bunch of squares on it just like this lower poly one it made? I thought normals were meant to put the HD details and smoothness over the low poly squares but it doesn't when I tried to use this, it bakes the squares into the normals.

Cool stuff!

thank you

Thank you soo much

Спасибо за выпуск :)

hello,Grant, thanks for your tutorial, can I ask why when I exported my model, and then imported others software that shows it lost UV? How to resolve the problem? Thank you in advance!

So Christmas comes in April this year

I noted that when I export or save out the retopologized mesh, it is a much higher polygon count. This happens even though I do all the reduction techniques. It still comes out with far too many polygons for a good import into other 3D programs. DAZ Studio, will not import the new mesh generated using Instant Meshes, Wings 3D protests with a crash dump file, and Bryce 7.1 simply freezes. I have 64 bit versions of DAZ Studio and Wings 3D. Bryce is a 32 bit program with no 64 bit version available. What are the actual steps needed to save the reduced topology into a new mesh?

@grant Is there a way for the software to preserve the texture UVs? It so it would be a great way to cut out the normal mapping process. Also is it normal for having to actually type out .obj when saving the retopogized mesh or is that just me?

thanks alot it dos work , but I cant see the mesh in the app can anyone help me

Hey man please help I exported this Obj file from Zbrush which have around 670k points and open it in instant meshes but the app just loading and not respoding in the graph coloring process. Cheers

This is Great! i know it's bad for face topology and hand topology but would it be okay to seperate these and only use IM to do the body? or would it sill be wrong for animation?

Doesent instant meshes mess up topology abit in a bendy areas making harder to animated?

Interesting but it doesn't look like something I would use. If you use shrink wrap for the arms and legs and vertex projection to surface for the armor parts, half of which is mirrored anyway, you can build this character in an hour and use a fifth of the verteces of the 5000 used.

would you recommend this over manual retopology ?

I have an Issue: I try to retopologize a high-poly character, and almost everything is fine, except that this character has pointy, straight claws, and when I extract the mesh, it always looks messy, the claws disappear when reaching the pointy ends, and some faces float. Any solution to this?

I think the flipped normals guys fooled us all with Retopology 😂

Is there a way to preserve UVs?

Grant Abbitt:i got one problem when i import in instant mesh my 3d model and then some faces missing actually are invisible, then what to do?!

Any tips or rules if thumb when deciding how much to decimate the original model? Maybe decimate by a certain percentage of the original model size, or just down to a specific number?

amazing thaaaaaaaaaaaaank yoooooooooooooooooooooooooou

I know this is an old post and I might not get a response but I tried to use instant mesh and it breaks my mesh. What should I do?

Did instant mash apply to all 3D software?

Thank you 😮

I was under the impression Blender would already have this capability.

Hi can I use it for dyntopo base mesh , and again importing in blender and sculpt in multiresolution modifier , and then finally retopo again manually ?? It will be very helpful , if reply

Does this preserve UV maps?

Thank you! That was an awesome tutorial series. But one doubt. Does reducing the face count always reduce the detail. I have seen models with around 20k tris whilst maintaining high details in artstation. How do they do that?

Thank you papa

you are the best

Hey I was wonder, why aren't you using substance painter for your texturing? OTher than the cost of it and availability, unless that's the reason? Cheers! Love your hand painted tutorials. I always wanted to texture in the wow style/handpainted, but I hate texturing in photoshop

I need help. After I complete the topology, the file cannot be saved to the computer. Why is that? error:write mesh

Thanks Grant. Just downloaded Instant Mesh. Any idea if Instant Mesh will work on a mesh with holes in it? For instance, one created by Meshroom with no bottom? Need a way of quickly meshing the bottom of those Meshroom creations to allow easier retopology. Tricky using shrinkwrap or snap to if no bottom on your mesh.

Thank you so much))) But why retopology is so necessary if we have such a powerful tool to work with? Because effect is the same?

Does it available for 32bit processors

Guys! That's super cool, but when I export the new mesh, it loose all the UV maps, so it's useless for me... any suggestions?

Hello, I can't understand if it's possible to animate the model, after this type of automatic retopology :/

why does mine lose some of its faces when I export it back into blender

is Instant Meshes free to use?

Excuse me, where is the link?

Instant meshes is good for 2 million polygon models to few hundread or 1000 polygons?

Anyone stress tested this software ? I just tried to upload a 1gig model and it just hangs

can it make symmetry mesh?

There is actually an add-on for implementing some of the IM features right into blender. It can also quickly send model from blender to IM. Maybe someone will find it useful. Thanks.

WHYY i discover you only now ???!???

Only good for static object and often if you want to sculpt afterward the geometry generated by IM will be full of naughty errors! Don't even think about it for animated models!

Why doesn't blender support such a feature out of the box? Wouldn't it be rather easy to implement with all the expertise the blender team has? Did they figure there's no need to include it when others already do it and better or what is the reason? I don't know much about 3d modeling, so everytime I come across this topic I see either "do it by hand" or "use some external tool X".

My mesh comes out broken...

Cool thing, i thought you were using the blender addon for this.

Process is excellent…until I try opening up the model back in Blender - which it won’t do 😕

wow your voice is Doublage voice 👌 :)

Dude, it's very far to consider a retopology

instant mesh doesnt do a good job...

fairly straight forward, huh?? whatever... foh

Thank You so much!!