I need to sculpt some simple wrinkles on to a character’s lips, however, increasing the multiresolution levels is causing several problems, where the whole character becomes very dense, but not enough for the lips, needing me to go over 90 million polys which is overkill and slows down Blender.
I understand that the lips may not have enough edges but that’s intentional since the character is made for animation in mind and it has a fairly low poly but clean and effective geometry.
How can I sculpt the required detail without having to make the character needlessly dense?
elaborated answer: you could use dyntopo, but it will damage the topology. the other method is select the lip parts and add edge loops/subdivide in edit mode and terminate any connections into other nearby vertices thus creating poles or extraordinary vertices to not redirect the topology to other areas of the face.
If it’s just wrinkles or other small details, you could probably make them with textures, like normal maps or bump maps, instead of actual topology. If a character is not supposed to be seen from a very close macro level distance, you can make all those details with texturing that don’t need a visible silhouette or parallax and depth effect.
but this only works with premade texture/alpha stamps for that, therefore he may want to sculpt them directly and use less subdivision levels (he will end up using subdivision but less levels for the lips/mouth) to add localized high poly details and then bake them into the “low poly” model unwrapped to make the texture maps.
Also, this is why we rarely see goodrealistic characters skin textures with fine skin details (and the shading/materials is other story, making it look good in the rendered shading is also hard), it’s so hard to make good pores/wrinkles details without high subdivision or requiring realistic textures from scans or even techniques/hacks like procedural/generated skin textures/alphas stamps.
I should’ve said that the character is not realistic, it’s stylized, but the lips look bland with just color information and generic roughness, I first tried getting it procedurally, but aligning it with the lips was proving very difficult. I only really need simple stylized creases to add more visual detail to the lips. But due to the low resolution of the area, it’s too blocky.
What I could try and do, perhaps, is turning the lips and the area around the lips into a separate mesh and subdivide as much as I need on that and sculpt it there and bake it.