I'm trying to do retopology on one of my models and I'd like to have the reference model display as solid and my retopology object in wireframe. so I can clearly see my faces while I work.
which seems to be what you do.
how do I get these transparent faces showing on top of the original mesh like you? I tried so many settings and I can't find how to do it.
I believe you're referring to the viewport clipping trick - it was my favorite for retopology. I say "was" because they changed this behavior with Blender 2.78. Here's the tweet of me finding this out 😞
Here's my secret: Whenever I want to retopologize with the behavior, I just open up 2.77a and retopo my model. No one will ever know
I believe F2 was added to Blender's included addons. So you should be able install f2 over to 2.77 pretty easily. Wasn't F2 created a long while before 2.77?
Alternatively you just use the current version of Blender without the viewport clipping trick. It can be a bummer when Blender devs change things we like, but it just comes with the territory.