I’m trying out sculpting for the first time on Blender. I’m trying to make a high poly sculpture so I can retopo for a game. This is practice, as I am a newcomer to 3D modeling. When I made the base mesh, I set the subdivision surface on viewport to 3 then I applied the modifier.
I went into sculpt mode and turned dyntopo on and set it to constant detail with a resolution of 3. I try sculpting with clay strips and smooth, but the sculpture is very rough. I noticed people making high poly sculpts with insane resolutions from 1 million to 6 million polys. My computer struggles at 2 to 6 million triangles/polys and crashes somewhere after 9 million triangles (with flood fill). And those are not numbers in rendering or textures.
My question is when I become experienced enough, what high poly numbers should I be aiming for? One million? I know I will have to retopologize, but what is the average high poly count for sculptures that game developers will eventually use to project details into normal maps for the lower poly meshes?
Should I continue with a lower resolution and scale up once getting the form finalized?
I hope someone can help because I’m at a loss right now. I’m just at my wits end. Thanks for any help.
Don’t obsess over the numbers. There’s no such thing as target polygon count, use however much (or little) is needed for the detail you want.
You’re going to be projecting detail onto a texture, which has limited size, so you would have limits to how much detail you can put onto it. For example, say you’re modeling a humanoid, with average surface area of about 2 square meters. And say you’ll be using a 2048x2048 normal map. Obviously you won’t be able to unwrap your humanoid perfectly to take up all the texture space, so let’s say you waste 15%. Thus useful texture space becomes 1740x1740. That means that you’ll have about 1234 pixels per meter, or 1.2 pixels per millimeter. Any detail smaller than that is likely to just become noise, or barely visible sub-pixel dots. Even individual skin pores for the whole mesh are out of the question with these limits, as they’re much smaller.
As you can imagine, these numbers will change depending on what you’re modeling and your chosen texture size.
Naturally, this translates to the size of fine detail you’ll want to sculpt. This, in turn, may give you an idea of how many polygons you can expect. In principle you could estimate how many polygons you’d have to uniformly detail the whole model (with that humanoid example, assuming polygons no smaller than a millimeter, you could expect, roughly, 3 million triangles). But with dyntopo you’re likely to put more detail on more important parts, and less detail on less important parts, so the polygon count can’t be a reliable guide. So, again, don’t limit yourself with some hard-set numbers and just keep in mind your expected detail size limit so that you don’t find yourself pushing polygons that no one will ever be able to see. But do occasionally look at it as a rough guide: back to the example again, if you’re at 6 million you’re obviously going way overboard, as that should be enough to cover the whole mesh with details of about half a millimeter.