What's new in v1.1.3

Measured across 44 production models, not on a test sphere. 38 of them come back at 95% quads or above and 19 at exactly 100.00%, with zero n-gons across all of them. 31 of the 33 assemblies keep every one of their parts. The same holds with symmetry on.

Five separate causes, and every one of them was a step that had been added to improve quality:

The repair step was destroying what it was there for. Every mesh was voxel-remeshed before the quad solve. Measured: QuadriFlow accepts a sphere and refuses the same sphere after voxelisation — "the mesh needs to be manifold and have face normals that point in a consistent direction", on a mesh with zero non-manifold edges, zero boundaries and 100% quads. The source is now solved directly, and voxel remeshing runs only as a repair, only when QuadriFlow declines the source itself.

Thin parts were fusing. The voxel size came from the bounding box, which overstates the surface area of a figure with outstretched arms by 3.5× — 5.237 m² against a true 1.507 m². The voxel came out at 14.5 mm against a 16 mm finger, and a 16-part figure came back as 6. Area is now measured on the mesh itself.

An assembly came back as one fused lump. A 46-part wooden table was reduced to 5 parts, a 55-rung ladder to 29, a 57-part camera to 1. Models made of separate parts are now solved part by part, each with a target sized to its own surface area, and each shrinkwrapped to its own geometry rather than to whatever surface happens to be nearest. Of the 33 assemblies in the test set, 31 keep every part.

The symmetry step was wrecking the result, in two separate ways. It cut the completed quad mesh with a plane and mirrored one half, which slices every quad crossing that plane: 99.9% quads and zero n-gons before the step, 76.4% and 407 n-gons after. The same cut also failed to weld the seam, so the model came apart along it — a 3-piece bust returned as 21 separate pieces with symmetry on, and as 3 with it off. The cut is gone: symmetry is requested from the solver itself, and the final pass only moves vertices onto their mirror positions — the face count and face types do not change at all.

Your target face count is now honoured on a dense sculpt. On a 500,000-face open sculpt, Ultra returned 831 faces instead of 10,000 — fewer than Low. Voxel remeshing fills a volume, and an open surface has none, so Blender returned not an empty mesh but a broken one: 362 faces where 23,600 were expected, and a smaller voxel gave fewer faces. The result of the repair step is now measured against what that voxel size should produce, and a broken result is discarded. Same sculpt now: Low 444, Medium 1,709, High 4,238, Ultra 9,473.

Things that were quietly being lost. Per-face material assignment was not carried onto the result — a 4-material camera came back with every face on the first slot. Vertex-group weights arrived at zero while the groups and the armature parent stayed, so a model looked rigged and would not deform. Shape keys stopped the add-on with a raw Blender error. A single zero-area face aborted the whole retopology. And if the source was hidden with H, the add-on edited the source itself and destroyed it. All measured, all fixed, all covered by a check that fails if they come back.

And symmetry now states its price. On a model that is not already symmetric about the chosen axis, making the result symmetric moves vertices — measured on a crowbar, the worst one by 4.72 mm. The add-on reports that number instead of quietly reshaping your model.

And the housekeeping. Every mesh the add-on created while working is now removed when it finishes — a 101-part model used to leave 106 orphan meshes in the file for you to purge by hand. Stray fragments of fewer than eight vertices that the quad solver leaves on difficult organic surfaces are cleaned off the result and counted in the report.

On closed meshes the volume holds: all 15 closed models in the test set keep their volume to within 1.8% of the source. On an open mesh volume is not a defined quantity, so no promise is made about it.

QuadForge — Automated Retopology for Blender (Sculpts & 3D Scans)

QuadriFlow quad solving with per-part handling, feature-edge preservation and normal transfer. Clean quad meshes from dense sculpts, scans and multi-part assemblies.

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Why QuadForge

Manual retopo on a million-poly sculpt is a day's work. The free options give you blob meshes that lose silhouette and sharp edges. QuadForge solves the source with QuadriFlow — part by part when the model is an assembly — bakes the high-poly normals onto the result, keeps hard edges hard, and carries your material assignment and vertex weights across. No cloud, no API key, no per-asset cost. Measured on 44 production models: 38 at 95% quads or above, 19 at exactly 100.00%, zero n-gons.

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Features

• Local pipeline — QuadriFlow quad solving with per-part handling, feature creases and shrinkwrap, all on your machine. Voxel remeshing runs only as a repair, on a mesh QuadriFlow declines outright.
• True quad output — measured across 44 production models, not on a test sphere
• Feature edge detection — sharp edges preserved as creases
• Normal transfer — high-poly normals baked onto the retopo
• Topology relaxation — configurable multi-pass smoothing for cleaner edge flow
• Auto-UV — optional Smart UV Project on the retopo result
• Honest reporting — every warning carries the number behind it: parts solved separately, parts fused and by which step, shape keys dropped, zero-area faces, material slots and vertex groups carried over

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Compatibility

• Blender: 4.2 and later (tested live on 4.2.9, 5.1.0, 5.2.0, 5.2.1 and 5.2.2)
• OS: Windows / macOS / Linux

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Limitations

• Quad flow is automatic — character animation rigs that need hand-placed edge-loops around joints may still want manual cleanup.
• Best on closed manifold sources; flat planes and open shells have no volume to voxel-remesh (the addon reports a clear error and suggests Solidify). Very thin / hair-card meshes may need pre-processing.

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What you get

• QuadForge add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

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Install

Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install... → pick the add-on zip → enable. Press N in the 3D Viewport → QuadForge tab.

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License

GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons.

v1.1.1 — Optimize Topology now explains what to do instead of failing with an internal error when pressed on a mesh that is not a retopology result. Two panels also asked for an icon named BRUSH_SMOOTH, which no longer exists in Blender 5.x — a bad icon name aborts the whole panel, so the Results and Tools sections came up empty. Every icon name is now checked against Blender's own list. Retopology now says when it had to fall back. QuadriFlow needs a closed, manifold surface; on a sculpt with open edges it declines, the fallback solver runs instead, and the result is about half quads rather than near 100% — measured: 100% on a clean sphere, 50% on a mesh with 168 non-manifold edges. The result used to arrive silently; it now names the number of non-manifold edges and what to do about them.