exoside quad remesher

[Elemeno]

are there any plans to support quads remesher? , this would be super handy

[jammer42777]

I second this, I would gleefully pay for a 3dcoat version.  And I already have the blender one

[Carlosan]

You need to ask Maxime Clement (Exoside founder) if he has any plan to develop a quad remesher plugin for 3DCoat.

https://exoside.com/company/about/

[AbnRanger]

On 8/18/2024 at 11:10 PM, Elemeno said:

are there any plans to support quads remesher? , this would be super handy

I seriously doubt it for 2 reasons. 

1) The size of 3DCoat's userbase probably doesn't make their effort to support it worthwhile

2) It's actually a competing product, offering the same featureset as 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo. To be honest, I find 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo to be outstanding in many cases, but there may be some situations where Quad Remesher gives a cleaner result.

[Elemeno]

5 hours ago, AbnRanger said:

I seriously doubt it for 2 reasons. 

1) The size of 3DCoat's userbase probably doesn't make their effort to support it worthwhile

2) It's actually a competing product, offering the same featureset as 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo. To be honest, I find 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo to be outstanding in many cases, but there may be some situations where Quad Remesher gives a cleaner result.

the more i think about it , the use case for the quad remesher wouldnt be worth it , the remesher isnt for final low poly , its for optimised topology or to make easier topology to edit , however any resolution added after completely changes the topology , so yea i dont see it coming either

[AbnRanger]

On 10/29/2025 at 10:59 PM, Elemeno said:

the more i think about it , the use case for the quad remesher wouldnt be worth it , the remesher isnt for final low poly , its for optimised topology or to make easier topology to edit , however any resolution added after completely changes the topology , so yea i dont see it coming either

I recently did a fair one to one comparison of the QuadMesher addon, using the Black Rhino from Rygaard as the high poly mesh (about 10mill polys) and to be very frank, I was surprised that 3DCoat did as good of a job Auto-Retopologizing the Rhino as QuadMesher. Even better in the eye region where the QuadMesher addon just kind of ignored the circular/oval shapes of the eye and socket surrounding it. 3DCoat did too, but at least with 3DCoat, I have the option to use stroke guides to correct that. QuadMesher doesn't, and I was very surprised about that. You almost need that feature sometimes. The other annoying thing I noticed about Quad Mesher is that it sort of replaces the high poly mesh instead of building the low poly retopo mesh on top of it. At least I could not figure out how to unhide the original high poly mesh. It's like grayed out in the outliner to where you cannot unhide it.

I think the Quad Remesher does apply Edgeloops along hard edges more strictly than 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo toolset, though. So, in total, as a Blender user, you would need to buy this plugin, plus one or two manual Retopo addons to try to replace 3DCoat's Retopo toolset.

[Henry Townshend]

I frequently exchange meshes between 3D Coat and Blender to use the Exoside Quadremsher. I don't find 3D Coat Autopo to be a decent replacement for ZRemesher (which is what Exoside Quadremesher is, it is the same algo by the same author).

Autopo in Coat can be good for organics, but as soon as you have to e.g., quickly autopo a belt or something more hard surface'y, it can be difficult to work efficiently.

I think it is safe to say that 3D Coat still would need a decent Autopo like ZRemesher/QuadRemesher. I come from Zbrush, and I never had to think about the quality of my quickly zremeshed meshes much during the process of modeling and re-projecting.

In 3D Coat, when using the Multi Res workflow on pieces, I often have to bring my meshes to Blender to Exoside Quad Remesh them, and then back. Even tho I love the bridge and it works flawlessly for me, it costs precious wok time.

So for me, I would def also welcome and pay for an integration.

Although I admire your passion for 3D Coat @AbnRanger and I often think you are right with a lot of points, in this I find it hard to agree that 3D Coats Autopo is just as good. This is not my experience.
 

The other annoying thing I noticed about Quad Mesher is that it sort of replaces the high poly mesh instead of building the low poly retopo mesh on top of it.

This is just how it is supposed to work. It is a RE-mesher, not a Re-topoer. 3D Coat does it this way yes, but it is not what is needed during the modeling phase, where you often just need a quick fresh mesh to re-project onto. If one doesn't want a mesh directly to be remeshed, one can simply hit Shift+D to duplicate it prior to the remeshing.

I find there to be little "annyoing" about that pluging or ZRemesher. I find 3D Coat Autopo to have much more annoying aspects. I think as passion users, we also need to stay real at some points and not try to shift truth around to make 3d coat more flawless seeming. I think this would help the software much more.

Also, with Exoside Quadremsher in Blender, you do have the option to use material ids quickly created from facesets to replace the Curve Guide functionality. It works reasonably well. You can more or less imitate curve guides with this in the latest versions this way.

Of course, if 3D Coat would integrate Exoside, a curve functionality would be welcome and necessary I think. 

Edited November 23, 2025 by Henry Townshend
add fix typo

[Henry Townshend]

Just found, that you do have the option to not overwrite the current mesh, but use a duplicate and hide the input mesh automatically.

So is is possible for Exoside Quadremesher to behave like Coat in that regard by simply ticking this checkbox:

 

Edited November 24, 2025 by Henry Townshend

[AbnRanger]

8 hours ago, Henry Townshend said:

Just found, that you do have the option to not overwrite the current mesh, but use a duplicate and hide the input mesh automatically.

So is is possible for Exoside Quadremesher to behave like Coat in that regard by simply ticking this checkbox:

 

Thanks for the tip. I just wanted to share my experience and I was pleasantly surprised by 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo result, without any tweaking (although I did later do some tests with Stroke guides because it was a tool that was available in 3DCoat and thus it would be fair to use it and compare with Quad Remesher's best result). I did acknowledge that Quad Remesher is probably more strict with its Hard Edge detection and forces edgeloops to stick to those edges better than 3DCoat. That makes it a better option for Hard Surfaces than 3DCoat's. However, for organic meshes, I find that 3DCoat's AutoRetopo often delivers results that exceed my expectations and are surprisingly good. As you can see from the comparison screen captures, 3DCoat performed as well...if not better...than Quad Remesher, in this example. 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo is the 1st image, in green, while Quad Remesher is the 2nd image, in orange. With some stroke guides, I think the 3DCoat result would be improved.

[Henry Townshend]

On 11/24/2025 at 6:00 PM, AbnRanger said:

Thanks for the tip. I just wanted to share my experience and I was pleasantly surprised by 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo result, without any tweaking (although I did later do some tests with Stroke guides because it was a tool that was available in 3DCoat and thus it would be fair to use it and compare with Quad Remesher's best result). I did acknowledge that Quad Remesher is probably more strict with its Hard Edge detection and forces edgeloops to stick to those edges better than 3DCoat. That makes it a better option for Hard Surfaces than 3DCoat's. However, for organic meshes, I find that 3DCoat's AutoRetopo often delivers results that exceed my expectations and are surprisingly good. As you can see from the comparison screen captures, 3DCoat performed as well...if not better...than Quad Remesher, in this example. 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo is the 1st image, in green, while Quad Remesher is the 2nd image, in orange. With some stroke guides, I think the 3DCoat result would be improved.

Maybe I am overlooking something, but that comparison, at a glance, makes the Quadremesher result vastly superior to me. In the green coat one, you can see the uneven poly distribution and stretching, which is not present in the Quadremesher. 

I struggle to see how this is a better result. Sure, you COULD improve the result in 3D Coat. However, the whole point of Autopo or Remeshing for me is that I need to quickly have workable meshes. I would not ever use the first green result, not even as a base to reproject my high poly onto during the sculpting phase. Because the uneven poly distribution will inevitably show and cause problems, very quickly.

Think of a Photoshop Canvas where you have a higher density of pixels in certain spot and a lower density in others. It is simply not workable.

3D Coat's Autopo, even with Curves, can cost a lot of time to get usable. For me, that kind of defeats the point. Of course, even in ZBrush, you can improve the result via curves. But it is just that, an improvement, not a "fix", like it often feels like in 3D Coat (if one is lucky).

For me, as someone who uses 3D Coat in production, both commercially and privately, the current algo is not sufficient to work with as an Autoretpo. There is simply no time to waste fixing a Remesh by trying to fiddle with curves and hoping it works. Exoside Quadremesher/Zremesher is far more reliable. In 3D Coat, I lose precious time when trying to remesh something.

Don't get me wrong, I would heavily cheer if 3D Coat's Autopo were able to do an equivalent job; I would really wish that. But it becomes apparent in the above comparison pics that it is not. And that is exactly congruent with my experience.

And of course, 3D Coat Autopo is still better to what Blender has to offer natively, no question. But it is not the same solid, reliable, workable quality as Exoside deilvers with Quadremsher and Zremesher.

 

Edited November 25, 2025 by Henry Townshend
typo

[AbnRanger]

3 hours ago, Henry Townshend said:

Maybe I am overlooking something, but that comparison, at a glance, makes the Quadremesher result vastly superior to me. In the green coat one, you can see the uneven poly distribution and stretching, which is not present in the Quadremesher. 

I struggle to see how this is a better result. Sure, you COULD improve the result in 3D Coat. However, the whole point of Autopo or Remeshing for me is that I need to quickly have workable meshes. I would not ever use the first green result, not even as a base to reproject my high poly onto during the sculpting phase. Because the uneven poly distribution will inevitably show and cause problems, very quickly.

Think of a Photoshop Canvas where you have a higher density of pixels in certain spot and a lower density in others. It is simply not workable.

3D Coat's Autopo, even with Curves, can cost a lot of time to get usable. For me, that kind of defeats the point. Of course, even in ZBrush, you can improve the result via curves. But it is just that, an improvement, not a "fix", like it often feels like in 3D Coat (if one is lucky).

For me, as someone who uses 3D Coat in production, both commercially and privately, the current algo is not sufficient to work with as an Autoretpo. There is simply no time to waste fixing a Remesh by trying to fiddle with curves and hoping it works. Exoside Quadremesher/Zremesher is far more reliable. In 3D Coat, I lose precious time when trying to remesh something.

Don't get me wrong, I would heavily cheer if 3D Coat's Autopo were able to do an equivalent job; I would really wish that. But it becomes apparent in the above comparison pics that it is not. And that is exactly congruent with my experience.

And of course, 3D Coat Autopo is still better to what Blender has to offer natively, no question. But it is not the same solid, reliable, workable quality as Exoside deilvers with Quadremsher and Zremesher.

 

Yes, we could nitpick a few areas in each example, but it seems clear to me that Quadremsher is more focused on strictly even quads, where 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo algorithm focuses on more optimized meshes. You can see this in the area you called stretched. It looks that way when you expect all evenly spaced quads. But, under further examination, 3DCoat is simply prioritizing spacing and placing more polygons where they are needed. The "stretched" area is actually just a flat surface area that doesn't need so many polygons. I prefer that, rather than forcing evenly spaced quads. Adding stroke guides was actually my idea, back in 2009, when Auto-Retopo was first being introduced into 3DCoat. It was the first Auto-Retopo in the industry and ZBrush copied it with Z-Remesher a few years later. I am sorry to disagree with you, but the ability to dictate the topology with stroke guides IS NOT a fix. It's something you use from the very first attempt on some models where you know you want and need a very specific topological flow...such as the face/head of a character that is intended for animation.

 

This example I made personally, in the 4.7 promo video (the end starting at the 2:27min mark), delivered as good, if not better results than I could ever expect from Z Remesher or Quad Remesher, and the algorithm has since been improved. I am not buying the notion that 3DCoat's Auto-Retopo is significantly inferior to Quad Remesher. Yes, there were some models where I wasn't totally pleased with the result (too many spiraling loops, and I would like to see that eliminated in the near future), but more often than not, Auto-Retopo...when used correctly...does a bang up job and quite frankly, I would take the mesh it created over the one Quad Remesher made, even though both are good results IMHO. If I felt I needed the "stretched" (optimized actually) polygons to be more uniform, that would only take 10 seconds or so to fix. I could simply select the vertices/polys in that area > RELAX a few times. If I had to choose between the two for Hard Surface objects, yes, I would probably choose Quad/Z Remesher because it seems to be very strict with Hard Edges in placing edgeloops along them. That is something I hope Andrew can improve soon, too.

These last 2 videos demonstrate stroke guides being needed and used with Z-Remesher, and also that it too sometimes has issues with spiraling edgeloops, so Z-Remesher is not immune to issues that require fixes, cleanup or re-attempts. It's an Auto-Retopo toolset. They just simply call it something else. An Auto-Retopo feature is by nature a REMESHER. It's generating a new mesh that is generally lower in number of polygons and a cleaner overall topology.