Using Polystrips crashes Blender 4.4.0 MacOS Sequoia 15.4

[EiwynnH]

I've been using Retopoflow 4.0.0.alpha.5 and Blender 4.4.0 on MacOS Sequoia 15.4

1. The main issue is that Polystrips crashes Blender.

I used Add > Mesh > retopology at cursor, sometimes it crashes immediately sometimes it's fine for a while then crashes. This has happened several times including when I tried using the polystrips on Suzanne. Here's a link to crash reports and terminal text and my .blend file here.

2. The secondary issue is that only the PolyPen seems to function properly in the context of my workflow. The other tools are confused by a model made from several meshes. My hi-poly is made up of several meshes. As I've sculpted I've split the mesh and used the the solidify modifier in modelling a glove to mimic fabric and seams to get the level of detail I want. I only need the high poly to bake the detail to the low poly in Substance Painter.

The high poly has a poly count in the several million for the whole model so I made decimated copies to make it easier for retopology.

For example the contours tool won't work on the finger of a glove if there is one mesh for the fabric of the front of the glove, one for the thinner material between the fingers and another mesh for the rear of the glove. It doesn't work even when the meshes are joined.

If I'm building a low-poly in standard Blender joining a multi-mesh model works fine. I start from a plane and extrude using shrink wrap modifiers and snapping options. Blender recognises the joined meshes as one to apply the shrink wrap to. In Retopoflow even on two default cubes joined the contours tool doesn't seem to see the join as Blender. I've tried using add retopology at cursor and add at active. (see screenshots attached.)

Tweak tool doesn't work in Local mesh view - the tweak tool will only work on what it can see and doesn't work at all if you press / to get an isolated local view of the retopology mesh. This means I have to go back into regular Blender tools to grab hidden verts so the tweak tool can see them even after using clean up on the mesh. I realise some of the problem will be from the snapping being confused by the thin model in the high poly. I've used the clean up function to get all the normals pointing the right way and to try to snap all of the verts to the outside of the model.

I really hope v.4 of Retopoflow can work for me even having used just the Polypen it really does make it all much easier than mucking about in standard Blender tools!

[vxlcoder]

Thanks for the detailed report, @EiwynnH !

I just sent a request to access the file you shared.

I will look over your report in greater detail soon, but I wanted to touch base on a few of your issues.

I made a recent change to PolyStrips that fixes a crash, so I am hopeful it solves your problem here too. we plan to have another version out next week.

As for the joined meshes, I'm not sure how to handle this on RF's end. To keep speed up and memory usage down, we are now using the raycasting functions provided by Blender to work with high-res meshes. I don't believe there is an easy way to switch these functions to see the meshes after computing the modifiers. As a workaround, you can apply the modifiers and work on that mesh, but I will think more about this, maybe push to a later version of RF.

I think I know what you're talking about with using tweak in local view, so I will investigate this further.

Working on meshes that are very near each other (gloves, fingers), it might be easiest to simply hide the meshes you're not working on at the time. RF should ignore any hidden mesh. It might make sense to have a setting to choose which meshes are to be considered and which should not, that way you can still see all the relevant meshes but only snap to certain meshes. (in other words, like a mask)

[EiwynnH]

Hi Thanks for taking a look, I've given you access to the Drive file hope you can access it now.
All the modifiers have been applied to the meshes in the file you have.

I think it's only Contours that in this context I can't avoid using across multiple meshes. I can absolutely see why it's working the way it is, the Contour tool sees the thin mesh and puts a contour round that mesh. It has no reason to go anywhere else.

I'm not totally sure how the join function in Blender works beyond making all the layers one object. I know it doesn't really join the geometry. I think the Shrinkwrap modifier "sees" a joined mesh as one thing and somehow knows where the outside of the whole object is. It's by no means perfect and you do have to apply it and then re-add the modifier multiple times as you go and there is a certain amount of messing around with the snapping options!

If there's a way for RF Contours tool to "see" the outside of a joined mesh in a similar way that would be amazing.

I've gone back and tried only working on one mesh at a time. You are right, Strokes and Polystrips (when it doesn't cause a crash) are fine if you make sure you are working on one mesh. It gets confused and mangles things if I slip over to another mesh. However, joins over to other meshes can be made with Poly Pen.

PolyPen doesn't seem to care and works across the meshes whether they are joined or not. To be honest even just using Poly pen with the relax and tweak tools is way better than the old method in Blender I used!

[jlampel]

For the crashes, this is a duplicate of #1490.

The most common PolyStrips actions have been fixed in this new build you can try, though one problematic situation still remains as seen in the issue above.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7nbopcn976ud5153attiv/RetopoFlow_v4.0.0_alpha_7.zip?rlkey=cr7njqwy5iru893yjjdqmskqk&dl=0

As for Contours, the reason it's not seeing the result of the joined mesh is not because of modifiers (Blender's ray cast does evaluate on the end result of modifiers) but because Contours walks along the mesh. Joining two objects together does not make them evaluate as one since the meshes themselves are disconnected.

In a lot of cases this is desirable, so that you don't have to worry about things overlapping in screen space, I.E. you can use contours perfectly on fingers even when part of the finger is occluded by another. But in other cases, like you mentioned, it's not always what you want. @vxlcoder has been working on alternative methods for contours, and the Skip method that is in the recent builds looks like it should handle this nicely and be the best of both worlds. It's still experimental and fails fairly often, but we can look at this more when the more important issues like the crashes above have been solved and we're further along in the beta.

Closing this since it's a duplicate + a known feature request, but please keep the feedback coming as you have it. Thank you!