You can model in a natural and organic way using Quad Draw. The Quad Draw tool offers a streamlined, one-tool workflow for retopologizing meshes. The manual retopology process lets you create clean meshes while preserving the shape of your reference surface.
See Open the Quad Draw Tool, Retopologize a mesh with Quad Draw, and Quad Draw hotkeys.
Your reference surface can be a polygon mesh, NURBS surface, or construction plane. See Set a live surface. Quad Draw Options
- Overlay Append Mesh
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When on, new topology created with the Quad Draw tool overlays the reference surface. The edges of the new topology are thicker than the reference surface's wireframe, making it easier to distinguish between the two meshes. You can change the color of the edges by clicking the color swatch.
- Auto-weld
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When on (default), the Quad Draw tool automatically welds adjacent vertices and edges. Auto-weld can be used with the Extend tool and Quad Draw tweak mode to prevent overlapping components on your new topology.
Adjust the slider to set the tolerance of the weld operation. For example, if the Auto-weld tolerance is set to 10, any components that are 10 pixels or less apart are merged. You can also toggle Auto-weld in the Quad Draw tool marking menu.
- Relax
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Lets you even out the spacing between vertices on a surface, cleaning up new topology you create with the Quad Draw tool. You can smooth the entire surface or focus the relax operation on a section of your mesh. See Relax vertices with Quad Draw.
The following options let you lock vertices, so you can limit your relax operation to border vertices or interior vertices.
Tip: You can also select the following options from the Quad Draw tool marking menu.
- Auto-Lock
- (Default) Uses the location of the cursor to determine which vertices (interior vertices or border vertices) to lock. When you start to relax border vertices, the relax brush automatically locks interior vertices. When you start to relax interior vertices, the relax brush automatically locks border vertices.
- Interior vertices
- Locks border vertices so they remain in the same position while you relax interior vertices.
- Border vertices
- Locks interior vertices so they remain in the same position while you relax border vertices.
Only those vertices that are part of continuous border edge can be relaxed at the same time.
Note: You can relax borders when Border vertices or All vertices is enabled. Border vertices produces a slightly different result, because it only averages the weights of border vertices. - All vertices
- The relax brush affects all vertices.
- Extend
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Lets you extend the edges of a mesh to create new polygons. See Extend edges with Quad Draw.
Tip: When the Quad Draw tool is active,
+ 
+ 
-click to select the following options from the Quad Draw tool marking menu.
- Edge
- (Default) Extends a single edge of a mesh. Tip: When Edge is selected, you can also drag vertices to create new polygons.
- Loop
- Extends an edge loop of a mesh.
- Border
- Extends the border of a mesh.
- Quad Strip Width
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Sets the width for quad strips. See Create quad strips with Quad Draw.