I seem to remember a way to mimic Maya’s refine tool using a combination of multi-res and a duplicated object that was assigned the same mesh, or proxy. Is anyone familiar with the SubD refine tool in Maya and know how to get similar results in Blender?
I really like it for the fact that I don’t need to continue adding edgeloops and causing concentration problems along the entire loop that I don’t need geometry in, and at the same time, I can model large details while keeping the fine detail and not having to wrangle hundreds of detail verts. Please let me know if you know any techniques like this, or to solve the problem I just mentioned
Another thought: The multires tool by itself can be a little difficult to work with when you want to be able to visualize the fine detail while working coarse, so maybe there’s a way to keep all the detail visible while only changing the edit cage around the multires model?
People tend to not use the hierarchical modeling subdivs in Maya. They are not really compatible with other packages, and they have some problems of their own, such as being slow and sometimes breaking when deformed. A better way to add small detail is using displacement maps, preferably with a renderer that does sub pixel displacement. If you have a high res enough mesh for good deformations, but without all the fine detail, you can use that as a starting point to sculpt a very high-res mesh with all the details you want. Blender has some built in sclulpting tools, or you could use commercial tools such as Mudbox or Z-Brush. Using software that compares the two meshes, you can generate a displacement map, and use that to render all the details.
I don’t know how viable the above workflow is with Blender, as I’m pretty new to Blender itself, but in theory it works great.
