Hey,
I’m quite confident with my modelling, creating and maintaining topology, etc., so I guess it’s time for me to buy a graphic tablet and get into sculpting. I know the basics, but don’t have any serious experience.
What are the main pros and cons of using Dynamic topology or the Multires. modifier? I’m sure both are useful, I just don’t know what are the basic guidelines on using them.
Thanks, cheers!
you don’t need a tablet to do sculpting. I have one, which I use for other things, but for sculpting, mostly I use my mouse. occasionally the tablet. the problem with multires is you need to increase the polycount of your entire model to achieve more detail…this can be taxing on your performance. the problem with dynatopo, is sometimes it leaves ugly topology and artifacts. take your pick.
Multires keeps your topology intact, but every time you increase your sub level every face in your model gets subdivided so bigger models may tend to get bog your system down. There’s a few workarounds to help with this but may not solve all problems. You can bake from high resolution meshes to low resolution ones.
Dynamic topology destroys your topology but allows you to increase mesh density where you want it which can help keep your poly count down while you’re fleshing out a model. So more detail can be added near eyes and mouth but maybe not necessary for the scalp, etc… Often a dynamic topology sculpt will get retopoed and then multires is used to add finer details like skin pores,etc…
Not an end all be all list but a few points to consider anyway.
Interesting question since I am totally inexperienced sculpting and last week I made my first serious experiments. What I’ve noticed is that with Multires you can not add new geometry with brushes while you sculpt and sometimes topology breaks down and is difficult to correct it, but with Dyntopo some brushes generate new geometry (triangles). This I say I’ve noticed for example with the “F Snake Hook” brush. You select this brush, choose a pretty big radius brush size, and compare between Multires and Dyntopo. So without having much knowledge of sculpting, I could say that the main advantage of Multirse is working with quads. I have also seen that Multires is used for baking normal maps from high to low poly. But Dyntopo model is more similar to sculpting with clay and working with Dyntopo is more flexible and gives you a little more freedom.
For me it was very pleasant to work with graphics tablet in sculpting because the pressure sensitive in tip (working with the tablet and with “F” and “shift+F” in keyboard).
Pros of dyntopo is it has better performance than multires when it comes to detail because you don’t have to add density to the whole mesh to add detail to one spot. Cons it doesn’t look good with smooth shading, doesn’t look smooth on it’s own, and can’t subsurf. Multires pros is it looks good for smooth shading and can use subsurfs. Cons is unless your pc is a monster you aren’t going to be able to achieve super high levels of detail. I’d use dyntopo to sculpt it then retopo + subsurf + shrink wrap modifier to make the topology look nice. If you want to do more from there just take the retopo back into sculpt mode and maybe add a multires modifier. Keep in mind I haven’t practiced this or sculpting much, I’ve just watched a lot of tutorials.
Dyntopo is useful for quickly banging out a rough sketch of the model and for modeling sculptures. Things can get a bit trickier if you try to texture and paint it as going into editmode and vertex/texture paint mode can become quite slow. Undoing things can also become quite slow as well at high polycounts.
In a sense, a good workflow in my opinion would be dyntopo > retopo > multires sculpt. The reason why is that it’s easier to texture, shade, and rig with a multires sculpt than a dyntopo sculpt.
Thank you everyone for your answers, things are a bit more clear now. I do archviz, so from my perspective, my best bet would be Shane’s recommendation, not caring about topology and using dyntopo, then retopo -> subsurf -> shrinkwrap, then maybe bake normal map if I don’t want my pillows with 3 million polygons.
Nice workflow, I’ll try this weekend 
About the tablet, well, they’re so cheap compared to other PC parts that I just have to get one. Normally I spend 15-20x that money for GPU and CPU so if I use it for only one job it’s already worth it. Pressure sensitivity should be nice plus I can also use it for PS and AI things.
Thanks for reminding me of UVs, I always forget unwrapping before destroying my topology :spin:
I always end up using Texture Coordinates (Object) -> Vector Mapping and Box Projection which is OK for uniform surfaces like fabric or stone, but will definitely kill a character or anything with more complex texturing.
If you plan to do sculpting and move onto zbrush later you should get a Wacom Tablet, an old one will also do. Sculpting with mouse is like painting with a brick instead of brush. Other tablets are rubbish, they do not have the sensitivity of a wacom tablet. Get a wacom intous 4 or above.
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The one obvious thing about Dyntopo is that you can’t be thinking about Topology while sculpting, but rather, it’s something you’ll be thinking AFTER you’re done sculpting. In some way it’s a good thing in that it gets you to focus on forms and shapes (creative/artistic side of things). On top of this, you can use METABALL and join other meshes with Boolean modifier to get the form and shape you want very quickly. We all know that Metaballs and boolean operations create messy topologies, but in DynTopo, Topology isn’t the main concern, and that allows us to get back into sculpting and focus just on sculpting. Another obvious thing is speed and performance. Thanks to DynTopo in Blender, I was able to experiment with digital sculpting for the first time.
Even though DynTopo is ideal for forms and shapes, it doesn’t mean that you can’t sculpt details with it. You could, but once your mesh is dense, like really dense, then undoing can be annoying since there will be a bit of lag. In non-DynTopo mode, I notice that there’s no lag when it comes to undoing your strokes, even with a very dense mesh. For this reason, I only use DynTopo for quick mockups and can always Re-Topologize to be used with Multi-Res Modifier for a cleaner sculpting. Personally, I think DynTopo is fun to play with! It’s another way of creating box forms out of it and the image I attached above is an example of that. For the purpose of illustration, it took me less than three minutes to box that head, using the DynTopo’s mesh as a template. (I sculpted both, left and right, with a tablet).