Getting Started
Vertexix turns a dense model — a sculpt, a scan, a photogrammetry capture — into clean, lightweight topology that still looks like the original. You load the model, choose which of its materials to work on, give those a new quad mesh, unwrap it, bake the original's look onto it and export the result. This page walks through that workflow and points you to the part of the manual that covers each step.
The workflow
- Load a dense model. Use File → Load... (Ctrl+O by default) or the sidebar's Load Mesh button.
- Choose the materials to work on. Toggle them on in the Material Tools window. A model with a single material needs no choice.
- Retopologize them, or pass them through. Create New Topology builds a new quad mesh for the chosen materials, using either the Manual Remesh or the Auto Remesh workflow. Pass Through (in Material Tools) copies the chosen materials into the new topology unchanged instead, skipping retopology for them entirely.
- Make a UV map. Generate UV Map unwraps the new topology.
- Bake from the original. Transfer Texture resamples the loaded model's textures onto the new UV map, Create Normal Map captures its surface detail, and Extra Actions adds an ambient occlusion map and other extras.
- Export. Export Mesh (Ctrl+E by default) writes the result to OBJ, FBX, glTF and other formats.
Steps 2–5 work per material, and the new topology is built up piece by piece: each time you run Create New Topology or Pass Through on a set of materials, the result is added to what is already there. That lets you give each part its own settings — a denser quad count for a face, a lighter one for clothing — and Material Tools keeps a list of the materials already in the new mesh, so you can see what is left to do.
Two meshes: Loaded and Generated
The Loaded Mesh is the model you imported; the Generated Mesh is the new topology Vertexix creates from it. The View: Loaded Mesh / View: Generated Mesh button at the foot of the sidebar switches between them, as does ` (the backtick key) by default. Many panels act on whichever mesh is on screen, so it is worth keeping an eye on which one that is — see Loaded Mesh vs. Generated Mesh.
The four sidebar modes
The tabs at the top of the sidebar switch it between four modes. Each one replaces the sidebar's controls with its own.
| Tab | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Retopology | The workflow above: choose Manual Remesh or Auto Remesh, then work down the numbered accordions from settings to baking. See Manual Remesh. |
| Paint | Paint on the model with brushes, layers, masks, stencils and the clone brush. See Painting. |
| Sculpt | Sculpt the mesh with brushes. See Sculpting. |
| Voxel | Block out a form from shapes and turn it into a mesh — the one mode that works with no model loaded. See Voxel Mode. |
Where to go next
- Quick Start: Your First Model — one model from loading to export, step by step.
- Remeshing a Model — choosing between Manual Remesh, Auto Remesh and Pass Through.
- Editions Compared — what Free, Light, Vertexix and Ultra each include.
- Projects & File Types — saving your work and the files Vertexix reads and writes.
- Glossary — the terms the manual and the app use.
- General Interface — the menu bar, the icon toolbar and how the workspace fits together.