Sculpting a high-poly mesh

[Werne]

Well, it seems that I can make much more beautiful normal maps with sculpting a high-poly mesh and baking the normals down to a low-poly mesh. However, I have a whole ton of problems by doing so, from completely freezing Blender to overcooking my graphics card, and that's at 120 000 polygons. If I go over 120 000 either Blender crashes or my comp crashes :wallbash: (BSOD). I know Zbrush can sculpt without the performance loss by using a 2D image and not a real 3D object but there is no way I'm giving 700$ for it, my salary is 500$ :(.

 

So, I'd like to ask is there a way to improve Blender's performance while sculpting? If not, are there any other free, or at least cheap, 3D programs that have better performance when working with high-poly meshes (I think that's unlikely)?

[Ghogiel]

honestly try sculptris. It's pretty cool. You do want to use tablet eventually though, while you can learn the software with a mouse, your sculpting will greatly benefit from a tablet.

[Werne]

Thanks man, Sculptris doesn't stutter much and my computer didn't catch fire when I subdivided so I'd say it's working good so far. In the meantime I tried sculpting with Maya but that thing is waaaay to complicated (plus, I'm too lazy to read the documentation :tongue:), all I manged to do is to subdivide the mesh and even that I did half-arsed. Though it doesn't stutter and freeze as much as blender, even at 200 000 quads.

 

By the way, me getting a tablet is not a good thing. Touchscreens hate me, whenever I use something with a touchscreen, the screen breaks. So now I just avoid them.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Werne

[Ghogiel]

tablet as in a wacom.

[Werne]

tablet as in a wacom.

It depends on where you live. Here where I live, tablet is a portable computer with a touchscreen, like Ipad. Wakom is called "digitalna ploča za crtanje" which means digital drawing board and calling Wakom a tablet is incorrect. My language is a bit too literal when it comes to translations so I often get mistaken about things. And yeah, that thing would come in handy.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Werne

[Ghogiel]

I'm writing English. Tablet, as in graphics tablet was using the term long before the an ipad existed. Edited April 3, 2012 by Ghogiel

[dazzerfong]

Regarding Blender crashing on you when you have a lot of poly's, you can turn off smooth shading: I could go from 3 million to around 5-6 million faces with it on. I'm using a lowly nVidia 9800 GTX+ and a Intel Core 2 Duo, so yours should be fine.

[Werne]

@dazzerfong I tried that too, managed to get it to 500 000 but it became too laggy to work with at 120 000.

 

And it seems Sculptris isn't performing too well either, it crashes when I use a tool if a mesh is over 280 000 polygons.

[Ghogiel]

For the most part pushing poly is going to be ram and cpu dependant. It could be the cpu overheating.

All that slow down is likely a cpu bottleneck or the closing of the program can be due to out of memory. with 4BG you should still be able to get one more subD level above 500k, making 2mil.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Ghogiel