ZRemesher with Nomad (iOS)?

With 1.77, I integrated Instant Mesh and QuadriFlow (the latter needs to be activated through the Debug Menu)

Both are (quad) remesher algorithm, but:

  • Instant Mesh tends to be reliable but the edge flow isn’t great
  • QuadriFlow is a bit of hit-or-miss

There is a possibility of integrating the Exoside Quad Remesher plugin (ZRemesher) into Nomad.
Would it be something interesting to do? Curious to see how you would use it.

(Note that forger just integrated ZRemesher natively)

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2 cents on it.
Quad remesh if I am not mistaken is done by the same guy that coded the Zremesher.
The result are pretty good and even better if you have way to guide it (Similar as zbrush polygroup/ hard edge constraint etc…)

Currently I am only using subdiv level in nomad to modify shapes and have masks that are soft on high polycount.
So I am not desperate for a remesher on Ipad. Its a quality of life but not a game changer.

However the bigger nomad expand the closer it become to be a true alternative software to Zb in the future and could be actually used in production.
Then integrate the exoside quad remesher to it in anticipation of the pc release would make a lot of sense.

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Well, if you are willing to integrate it and there’s a noticable difference to Instant Mesh and QuadriFlow then please go for it. Maybe you can select which one to keep before the release of 1.77

I would love to have a good auto remesh tool within Nomad, ideally to have an ok foundation topology to iterate on while sculpting. It would be a good starting point for the final manual retopo stage, to be later refined and cleaned up in Cozy blanket.

I tried Zremesher in Forger and was kind of disappointed by the results I got, mostly cause I missed the possibility to control the edge flow by using polygroups. They are supported in Forger apparently, but I haven’t been able to make them work with zremesher as I would do on Zbrush, most of the times it just crashed on me. Using the control guides is not always producing the results you’d expect so in the end I don’t know how useful the current implementation of Zremesher in Forger is, it’s more of a hit and miss at the moment and maybe not so much more useful than Quadriflow.

So in short, I think it would be very valuable to have Zremesher in Nomad if we get to have a good level of control of the edge flow and if there is a noticeable difference with what Instant mesh/Quadriflow already offers.

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exoside did the the original zremesher, and his blender plugin is great…I would pay for this…even as an in app purchase :wink:

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For me, it sounds fantastic. As a professional concept artist, I often use VR for my blockouts, Nomad Sculpt for detailing and finishing my work, bring it to ZBrush to decimate it, then import it into Blender and use the Quadremesher plugin there, followed by the “clean mesh” options such as HardOps.

I think the current quad options in Nomad are already fantastic, and if the integration of Quadremesher into Nomad would bring even more reliable clean edge detection and clean workflow, I would be more than happy to skip ZBrush and stay in Nomad throughout the entire process (:heart:), and just export and jump directly into Blender for scene setup.

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Je suis d’accord avec ce qui a été dit précédemment. Actuellement dans mon flow de travail dans Nomad je suis bloquer par un remaillage performant, surtout sur le contrôle des Edge… A suivre de prêt donc.

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Quad Remesher seems the best option available at the moment. I hope it would be for Android, too then.

Quite similar to QuadriFlow but with adaptive quad width/height ratios

If layer data could be kept on the retopo-ed mesh that would bring it on another level. It looks like Quad Remesher doesn’t support guide curves but if some structures could be exaggerated before remeshing using a layer, and then removed again after remeshing (like is possible with voxel already) that could open up some interesting workflows.

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I have it for blender and it’s very great but the fact to have it direclty on android and IOS because Cosyblanket and Forger are only on IOS would be a must, i definitely will pay for it too, i use nomad for work and combine it to blender and Quadremesher addon, it’s a time saver at work. If one day we will have bones, a near good instant retopo in nomad will help deforming mesh. And for product design it helps a lot too.

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As pointed out, Quadremesh was created by the same guy who made Zremesher. I’ve been using it in Blender and the results are so much better compared to other tools. I think this would be an awesome but maybe not critical feature to have in Nomad.

On the demo is that there doesn’t seem to be a symmetry option built in. You can clone left to right but it leaves a bunch of weird-looking quads.

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Integrating the Quad Remesher plugin would be amazing! I bought the Blender addon and I’m very happy because it has saved me a lot of time when retopologizing objects with many polygons, something essential for me.

For me, talking about retopology is talking about Multires: Nomad works well on the iPad with millions of polygons, BUT at a certain point in the 3D modeling process, it doesn’t make sense to have an object with tons of thousands of polygons constantly in the viewport when you can transform it into a virtually identical but more optimized object, right?

I mean… If sculpting is your hobby, you can do something simple, render it, post it on Twitter, and forget about it.

But other times, you may want to create something complex, either because you want to challenge yourself or because you are an artist who wants to test Nomad as a professional tool.

What can happen then is that without realizing it, as you sculpt more and more on a character or a prop, the number of polygons in your scene will increase dramatically.

Maybe the app works well (because it does), but it is very likely that your iPad will consume more battery or that the size of your files will flood that precious space on the hard drive that you need to store cute cat photos.

Everyone loves cats.

Also, you may want to paint your object with detailed textures in an external program like Blender or Procreate, so you need to do UV unwrapping first. And unwrapping an object with millions of polygons is never a good idea. It can make your computer explode.

According to the AGSSPWA (American Governmental Society for the Study and Prevention of Workplace Accidents), the explosion of computers and iPads due to users trying to do UV unwraps of objects with millions of polygons kills 7,200 people a year and injures another 2,000. A fictional fact that is not only made up but also very concerning.

-Cough- As I was saying…

From my experience, there’s nothing wrong with having fun sculpting an object with thousands of polygons, taking a couple of renders, and then saving it forever on the hard drive.

The problem is when you want to have a scene so big that you need to reduce that number. Or when you need to do a UV unwrap to apply shaders, paint the object, or make bakes.

There are several solutions. I’m going to describe them from “quick but limited” to “slow but versatile.”

1. Decimate an object, unwrap, make the bakes

It’s something that can already be done in Nomad and it’s great. It’s fast, and the results usually look good.

It’s been done for years in video games to make bakes of objects like rocks and statues where topology doesn’t matter much. Why spend 20 minutes doing the retopology of a rock if the result will be the same by reducing the geometry and projecting the details?

Problems: The UVs are usually shapeless and irregular masses of triangles that do not properly occupy the square surface of the UV space and waste valuable space.

Also, once you make the bake, although you can finally paint the colors, all the geometric details are transferred to the Normal Map texture. That means that if you decimate an object and later want to go back to add more detail, you won’t be able to because that detail will no longer exist.

2. Auto-retopology with something like Instant Meshes + bakes

The UVs are somewhat better because the faces (quads) can be fitted better (I don’t have data, but from experience, I know that it’s easier to fit a bunch of squares into a larger square than to fit a bunch of triangles into the same square, if that makes sense).

3. Auto-retopology with Instant Meshes + multires + detail re-projection

This involves converting an object with thousands of polygons into an identical one but with several levels of multiresolution. The good thing? You can raise and lower multires levels at will.

Do you want to modify the main shape without altering high-frequency details? Lower the multires level to the lowest.

Do you want to add pores and wrinkles to a face? Raise it to the highest level.

If your scene has a lot of polygons, you can go one by one lowering the multires levels of the objects that have it to preserve a fluid, responsive viewport (even in old iPads). And I’m talking about going really high (not Zbrush “high” but very high than usual).

Are you satisfied with the details and colors? Stay with the lowest multires level and make the bakes re-projecting all the details there.

4. Auto-retopology with Quad Remesher + multires

The good thing about this algorithm is that it works very well in areas such as edges and in preserving the natural flow of details. In other words, Quad Remesher captures more detail with fewer polygons compared to other algorithms.

In practice, this means fewer problems when subdividing geometry with multires, as there are generally fewer “Poles” in inconvenient locations and other crazy things like infernal “spiral loops”.

Additionally, the topology better follows the details, so re-projecting geometry causes fewer problems and artifacts. It’s not foolproof, but it causes fewer problems.

And having problems is equivalent to wasting time.

And wasting time is equivalent to losing money.

And artists are already poor.

5. Manual retopology + bakes + blablabla

It’s the slowest solution but the one that offers the most control. Cozy Blanket is cool, but let’s be honest: if Quad Remesher comes out for Nomad, many artists will forget about Cozy Blanket.

Doing manual retopology can be “Zen” and yada-yada-yada but I and many people have paid €90 not only out of masochism but because doing retopology is something “key” for many of us, and there are no other ways to do it on the iPad (…for now?).

In summary, I have no idea how useful adding Quad Remesher to Nomad could be because although I find it very useful for optimizing and working with sculpted objects for all the advantages I’ve explained in this post poorly translated into English with ChatGPT, I don’t know if other Nomad users would find it useful.

But if there’s one thing I know:

  • Adding something like ZRemesher in Nomad would definitely catch the attention of artists who use it in Zbrush or Blender (at least it catches my attention because I never imagined seeing something so useful to me inside an app like Forger). It’s inspiring to see incredible artists like Shane Olson already using Nomad and I think adding these types of tools could stimulate the curiosity of many artists who want to break free from the constraints of the desktop PC to sculpt wherever and whenever they want.
  • Adding it could be a first step… but without guides or other ways to control “the flow of loops” it could result in a user experience that is certainly “fantastic but sometimes frustrating”. I never use guides but it would be nice if there was a way to control retopology (maybe there will be one, I don’t know).
  • If this ends up in Nomad and it means paying more… people will pay. At least I wouldn’t mind paying for an upgrade that brought this. Ideally, it could be allowed for the Exoside license to be activated somehow from within Nomad to access that tool… but this is no longer my concern.

I’m just speculating. I’m a little nervous and excited about all of this. Hopefully, this will come to fruition. And if it never happens, it doesn’t matter. Because Nomad will still be great.


PD: This is a post on Blenderartist talking about Quad Remesher in Blender (there are a lot of interesting experiments and tests) Quad Remesher auto-retopologizer - #461 by Daf57 - Released Scripts and Themes - Blender Artists Community

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Short answer:
This please! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kSaJ1b4QZU

Long answer:
I’ve shared my tests across zbrush, forger, nomad in discord and a little here, but the high level targets for me would be:

  • Controllable layout via polygroups. For most people it strikes the right balance between control and speed. Cozyblanket manual retopo has lots of control, but is too slow. Vanilla quadmeshers are fast but don’t give enough control.
  • Avoid voxel remesh issues. Voxel remesh will often lose sharp detail unless you go very dense, and can get ‘acne’ if you try and smooth surfaces where the poly layout is fighting the curvature.
  • Better support for deformation. When edges flow the right way, blendshapes are much easer to control, bending arms/legs/tentacles is much easier.

(final edit) Like others, I’d be happy to pay for this.

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Pease!! Integrating the Quad Remesher plugin would be amazing, will make Nomad produce industry production quality model much easier. Professionals would choose Nomad in a heart beat ^^

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Quad Remesher have the best quality between these options, professionals will choose Nomad in a heart beat just for it!

Quad Remesher would be a great tool to have. I’m hoping Nomad will eventually get manual uv unwrapping tools and this a step towards that.

Quad Remesher is definitely far better than the other algorithms and as such would be a massive addition to nomad.

I can already see myself using and reusing it especially if it comes with the polygroups feature for added flow control. Infact, I would pay to have it in nomad in place of instant meshes and quadriflow!

Adding my support for this. It would certainly welcome zremesher. It’s pretty much the only reason I leave nomad for zbrush. I would also be down with it being a paid plugin if that helps!

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Sounds great. Even more so if you can add guides to control edge flow.

I’m on board with being willing to pay, but we should probably be clear that given the prices of Quad Remesher’s desktop plugin, I’d hazard a guess that the price would be several times that of Nomad itself.

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Still under discussion and I won’t disclose private stuffs, but so far:

  • iOS: I prefer a native integration so it will either be that or nothing at all (the only issue for me is a an annoying licensing technicality stuffs, caused by the iOS ecosystem, I need to check about that)
  • Desktop: zremesher on Nomad desktop will likely be through plugin only
  • Android: very unlikely (not worth it for Exoside)
  • Web: never for obvious reason (I won’t commercialise it anyway)

The plugin is 90$, but if you add +30$ you can use it everywhere (Blender, Modo, etc).
But we are not really moving towards iOS plugin, so…

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