I’m much more compfortable with the sculpting process than I am with the normal rigging process. BUUT I’ve tried using multires a couple of years ago to sculpt an animation rig and I/Blender completely destryoyed my 2 week work and that kinda made me stop learning 3D. Now I have a bit more energy and goals, so this time I hopefully won’t drop 3D art. I’d like to know if the modifier is any better now though or is it still buggy? Are there maybe some guidelines what to do and not to do? Or should I go the oldschool long road by first rigging a low poly model and then sculpt in detail?
Sculpt, retopo, then rig or even bake detail from the sculpted high detail sculpt to the retopologized mesh. You should not have any problems that way. Animated organic objects need good topology to allow for deformations in the mesh. Mechanical you can kind of get away with not having to do all those steps as armatures are not bending and causing deformations.
Thx I’ll give that process a try.
I’ve heard that there were some long standing gliches with the multires modifier, but I personally haven’t experienced anything aside from that issue where you get spikes when you sculpt on a lower lvl of detail. It should work if you stick with the highest lvl of detail and don’t add any extra geometry to the base mesh.
The multires modifier is based on catmull-clark subdivision surfaces, so it should work in all the same situations the subdivision surface modifier works in. If the base mesh has good topology, then in theory you should be able to use the multires to sculpt more detail without having to change the model geometry.
Can you explain the issue in more detail? When you were sculpting with the multires, did you do anything in particular before it messed up your model?
Also, when you say it destroyed your work, do you mean that it messed up the detail that was sculpted with the modifier, or do you mean that it somehow destroyed the mesh you were sculpting on? It shouldn’t be possible for the modifier to damage the mesh itself.
As a side note, if I undesrtood correctly, a couple of years ago you had your mesh destroyed permanently by some bug or something and lost two weeks of work. That sounds awefull. Blender offers a couple of different ways to go back to a previous state of your file (auto saves and temp blends), but still, I belive it is good practice, in blender as in any sofwtare when doing 3d, video editing, etc, to save different backup copies of your file rather often in case anything goes wrong, because loosing one’s work and worked hours is a real bummer.
It’s been so long ago I don’t remeber the details anymore. What I remember is that the project became unworkable. I couldn’t do anything with the project only thing left was to start from scratch. That’s when I quit.
I did have backups but they weren’t usable to me. It wasn’t just blenders fault. I think I did something wrong too but I can’t remember what it was.
I don’t sculpt often, but I’d say that the multires is relative stable as long as you don’t add geometry to the basemesh or try to sculpt on a lower level of detail. However as Chanfiroly has said, it is always a good idea to make backups.
By default it saves a spare copy of the project as .blend1, and it will also autosave every two mintues to your systems temp directory (/tmp on linux. This setting can be changed under File > User Preferences > File tab).
You also might want to set the multires to simple if you don’t want it to smooth your mesh.
There is a way you can apply the rigging after making it deform. Something you can consider if you want to deform, then sculpt using multi-rez. Not certain it’s necessary however. But if I remember correctly, if you have your object deformed, then switching out of pose made makes the model snap back to origin.