Retopology

[whitebirchstudios]

Retopology used to work well, but now it is a crapshoot. It freezes MAX most of the time, and if it does work, unless it is at a default count, it is slower than malasys.  I start with the default, and faise the count up a little each time. Something around 40000 Face Count stalls 1/2 way. RAM and processors are sitting unused, so it isn't a resource issue. What to do?

[darawork]

Hi, that's distressing to hear. I am looking forward to using the new Retopology features. I've not gotten around to testing them yet. I have them on my lower powered home pc, but not my work pc yet. I still use the old third party populate terrain plug-in, which although works, I have to be very careful on the size of the area it is being used on, and the size of the divisions requested from the plug-in... or else it just freezes up the system.

Could you please explain what size area you are retopologising, and perhaps your system specs, software versions.
This might help others join in, who have actually used it sucessfully, to perhaps say their tips and tricks.

I've been looking at a lot of tutorials about it recently, and I think this one seems to be the most in-depth so far:

It seems there are a lot of options available, and prerequsits that need to be performed even before the routine.
Where is your initial surface data coming from, an external software title or existing Max topology?

Regards,

[whitebirchstudios]

I had to do small sections and join them back together, which was never the case before. 3DS MAX 2022 and everything is up to date.

My current hardware setup:

• Alienware x17 R1
• 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-11980HK @ 3.30 GHz
• 64.0 GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU
• Windows 11 Pro

[darawork]

Okay, thanks for reply. Hopefully someone will be able to help you with
this soon. Consider my post a bump, seeing as I have not actually used
retopology myself yet.

Regards,

[ads_czechoj]

Thank you for posting your question here. I would like to learn more about the case. 
You said: "Retopology used to work well".

We need to find a reason for the bad performance of this tool.
It would be great if you could help me to answer few questions first.
My questions:
What changes could affect the Retopology performance?
New computer? New Windows (11)? New 3ds Max version? New Retopology (an update)? 3D model imported from a different 3D application? 
Please attach, if you can, the model for farther investigation. If you can't share the model on this forum, please  send me a link to a drop box.

[whitebirchstudios]

The only thing that changed was I installed MAX 2023 and the update for MAX 2022. I haven't used MAX 2023 yet.

[whitebirchstudios]

Here is a screen recording 

[logan_foster_adsk · Accepted solution]

A couple of items:

1) For what you are doing you do not need to utilize "Pre-Process". Pre-Process builds an intermediary mesh that is based on your input geometry, this geometry is then broken up into a regularized Triangle output and then that is used to build the final result. This intermediary mesh (seen as the Remeshed Mesh in the Output settings) is of a much higher resolution than your final triangle count of your quad target so that it can have a suitable amount of information to work.

In your case you are not doing anything with your example mesh that would benefit from Pre-Processing and are just adding extra calculation time and memory by doing this step with this type of mesh. So it would be best if you turn off "Pre-Processing" in an example like this.

2) You are also attempting to use Auto Edge constraints (in this case Smoothing Groups) which are also not needed because you don't really have any smoothing data that is worth splitting.

[whitebirchstudios]

I see. A simple tool that did its job well got a little more complicated. I used the defaults, as I always did. I'll try it with your suggestions. Thank you!