Hello again
This is my second post, I’m new to blender and already mess with it for a few days.
So, this question may sound stupid but please be patience and if you can direct me to a good tutorial or anything it will be very helpful.
I found myself enjoy sculpting with the dyntopo, I can get really creative with it.
But let’s say I’m done with the super high poly sculpt (millions of faces)… now my machine is crying for death.
Is there a way to convert all the details to emulate over a low poly version? I think it’s called “normals” so I can somehow put these normal textures of the high poly version in a lower version but after looking around YouTube I got confused because there are so many and they cover different things in one video so I got lost.
Can you help me understand if this thing is possible in blender and also… if there is a simple (easy to follow) tutorial online, I’ll be happy to understand it since I’m new to the software.
You can try and duplicate the sculpt and use the decimate modifier to make a low poly version, but the real answer is that you need to retopologize it. That means creating, from scratch more or less, a low poly version with good topology. That means loops around the eyes, the mouth, square quads, even mesh density no poles > 5… You do that usually using snapping tools, or in some case you can take a premade basemesh and shrinkwrap it around your sculpt.
Once you have the low poly retopo, you can bake a normal from the high poly to low poly and keep some the sculpt detail without the millions of vertices. Oftentimes once the retopo if done you will sculpt (again) using a multires modifier, and then bake that to normal.
There are various other tools and add ons for retopo, countours is a good one that works best on cylindrical extrustions.
Thanks for the explanation Photox!
I’m kind of new to the all process, still looking around YouTube for tutorials because it will be easier for me to follow (visually).
I did saw that duplication process you explained, and then the bake process but still everything is a mess for me because I’m a beginner, hope I’ll get the idea because the sculpting process is so much fun.
Can you show a screenshot of your sculpt, as depending on what we’re talking about there be a simpler method but it will only work for very specific types of sculpts.
Actually I asked in general, there is no specific sculpt. I want to get used into a pipeline in blender that will allow me to sculpt and than texture/paint and setup my scene and render. but the reason I want the low-poly is that my scenes won’t be too heavy in case I will have many objects at once, also render time should be faster I guess.
You probably want to look into the multiresolution modifier. It is similar to subsurf, in that each level subdivides the mesh, but instead of the subsurf algorithm automatically interpolating and smoothing, it allows you to sculpt the mesh with increasing levels of geometry, while still retaining the right to view or modify lower levels without affecting the higher ones, or vice versa. So if you have sculpted fine detail, like pores on level 5, then decide, ok the cheeks should be larger as a whole, you can go to level 1 and make the cheeks larger, and then on level 5 the pores are still looking good. Here is 5 minute sculpt of suzanne. She does not have the best topology for this, but to give you the general idea.
Sounds like a great tool! Thank you
So, after I get all the details on level 5 for example. is there a “simple” way to convert the details into normal map and than project it on the lower version of level 1 (or 0 I’m not sure exactly).
Sounds great because I really want to try sculpt something with total freedom.
Is it the same process with Dyntopo or only with the regular/normal sculpt? (the confusion is because I’m very new to this…).
Also, can you recommend on up to date tutorial that shows the process in a clear friendly way to follow for beginners like myself?
Thanks again for your kind help I appreciate it!
Multires needs a base shape (A base mesh with decent topology), and then you refine that shape through the levels.
Dyntopo is total freedom, any shape goes, but you wind up with bad topology.
Dyntopo creates new geometry as you sculpt, so you can create anything using dyntopo from a cube. I once sculpted a dinosaur from a cube. That’s great, the drawback is that it is a triangle soup of verts. Now if you are making a statue, or something that can use a procedural material that might just be fine. But if it needs to be unwrapped, or animated you will need to retopo the dyntopo sculpt into a decent basemesh and then multi res it.
Sometimes I do a priliminary dyntopo sculpt, then retopo over it, and then multires that.
Other times I skip the dyntopo, model from reference images (or just wing it) and then multires.
For multi-res to work well you should have a basemesh with these qualities:
All quad (no tris or n-gons)
The squarer the quads the better (no elongated rectangles)
As even as a mesh density as possible. So no super tiny quads and then huge quads. To some degree this is more or less impossible.
Blender cookie has some good tutorials, some are free, some require an 18 dollar month membership. i became a member for a few months and went through a lot of great stuff and then let it lapse.
With the new blender update I thought I might give an easier method, I recently sculpted a mesh from the torso up, with full detail, actually a muscular one reaching up to 500k verts if I recall , multiplied by 2 about a million faces,and I ran into the same problem when I was ready to skin and pose it, all I did was to export it in an FBX format and reimport it to blender, automatically blender will compress the mesh (you’ll notice in the size) but the verts remain the same number, this time I added a deform modifier and it took the verts all the way down to 74k, but the details remained exactly the applied the modifier and was good to go
