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I have been struggling with striking the balance of transparency and visibility when retopologizing a mesh.

I need to be able to see the retopo mesh clearly, so I turn on "In Front" under the mesh object's properties. However, this often makes it hard to see the other mesh:

enter image description here

I can see the low-poly mesh just fine, but now I can't see what I'm creating the new topology for.

If I turn In Front off, then large patches of the retopo mesh become hard to make out because the high poly mesh is intersecting with it:

enter image description here

I thought that, perhaps, a solution would be to show the object in Material mode with materials with alpha blend on and some transparency in the alpha channel.

enter image description here

However, this also is very hard to see, because the patches wherever the meshes intersect are still there.

If I turn on Wireframe, there is just too much information, because of how dense the other mesh is:

enter image description here

The big problem here, I think, is that anything that intersects over the low-poly mesh hides its edges and vertices in the viewport in Edit mode, regardless of the transparency of the material. Unless I turn on In Front for the mesh I want to see, but that gives too much information, because in many cases I don't want to see across to the other side of the object - I only want to clearly see the mesh on the side of the object facing me in the viewport.

What I would like is:

  • to be able to clearly see the geometry of the low-poly mesh above the surface of the high poly mesh when I'm tweaking or retopologizing it
  • Not to have the geometry of the low-poly mesh on the far side of the model get in the way of seeing what I'm doing in front

Is there a better way?

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2 Answers 2

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The best solution so far that I could find was to turn on backface culling in viewport shading settings, and combine it with "In Front" viewport display option. Some alpha opacity is optional.

It's still quite hard to tell what's going on sometimes - screenshot as an example. I wish some better options were implemented, like "In front" but with total occlusion of backfaces, or selective wireframe toggle by object.

enter image description here

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just dont use Blender LOL.. Best way I could find is making and instanced copy that is in front and working mesh not in front. That should hide a bit of backface edges but not all

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