If I “Apply Base” I can’t remove the modifier without distorting the mesh, even if I haven’t altered the mesh shape at all. Is there a secret to applying base and removing the modifier without distorting the mesh?
Same here. The blue face fits inside the green face (multres’ed) in most areas after “apply base”, removing the modifier, and adding a subD modifier. They should be identical.
Again, the red head in the background had Apply Base used without modifying the face at all, then removing the modifier and adding subD.
It’s basically useless if it’s supposed to work this way. (Apologies if I put this in the wrong section. I’m not entirely sure where it’s supposed to go.)
This is how apply base work in Blender 2.8 now, when you are applying base you are modifying the base mesh.
Right. I expect it to modify the base mesh, but I would expect it to only modify the base mesh where the base mesh has been modified. For example if I were to use it to sculpt a new shape for the face, I would not expect the skull to grow an inch in height, and the most of the body to thicken. I would also expect the results to be similar to subdivision where the geometry to do so exists.
I don’t want to be locked in to keeping the modifier forever (it’s incompatible with shape keys, for one) or limited to only using the mesh in Blender. Subdivision is more universal, and plays nice with shapekeys.
Blender’s plans to automatically apply base with multires in the future, so I really hope I’m doing something wrong.
I m having hard time to follow, do you mean that while sculpting a full body you modify only the thorax and applied base, Blender will shrink the whole base model?
And about applying Multires. i usual bake my maps if there is a need. And shapekeys are working with multires. as long as i know, what kind of incompatibility you are facing?
That plan is still in the making of i have to an eye on it.
More or less, but almost everything expands rather than shrinks. You can see the inflation in the images I uploaded in the first post. The larger mesh was unmodified other than clicking Apply Base. After apply base it looked fine, but only until I removed the modifier.
Of course, there’s no reason to Apply Base on an unmodified mesh normally, but it seemed like a sensible way to test the odd behavior I’d noticed. (I experimented with some multires sculpting to clean up an earlier version of the box-modeled mesh above, but even the ears had a change in shape and I hadn’t touched them because I was already happy with them).
Apply base doesn’t work on a mesh with shape keys. Looks like that might be the only problem, however, so that’s not too bad. From what I’d read, I was under the impression there were bigger incompatibilities.
Dude, i tested apply base and i believe the way is working is not good. As you said Apply Base expands the mesh, you should make bug report, this is a bug. You can tag me.
Unfortunately, “Refit Base” doesn’t seem to be currently in Master, and I haven’t had any luck trying to manually edit it back into the source code by referring to the diff (probably because of the changes to the modifiers panel UI, which is now written in C). It’s in “Needs Revision” status, so I assume it’s pulled until Dobarro revises the patch and his revisions get approved.
I just tested D7644, things are still not good. If D7644 get applied to the master the behavior will change: “apply base” will shrink the mesh and “refit” will expand it.
In the gif below i have an old model that i sculpted today and duplicated 3 times, rename them apply base, refit and base and i executed multires. accordingly. Look at the outliner you will see what i m selecting.
For now i will advise to stay away from those features if you really don’t know what you are doing.
I’ve figured out how to get close enough to make multires usable and get the base mesh reasonably close to the sculpt (on a build I modified with Dobarro’s Refit code because it is not in main yet).
I applied the multires modifier, then added a new multires modifier and clicked Rebuild Subdivisions (which brings me back to the original polycount). Then I duplicated the rebuilt subdiv mesh and clicked Refit (on the duplicated mesh). Next I joined the Refit mesh to the Rebuilt mesh as a shapekey, with a value of 25%. A little detail is lost and some shaping is off, but it’s close enough that it wouldn’t be too much effort to fix with some light poly modeling or sculpting at base res after applying the shape key.
Taking this mesh and joining it to the original base mesh as a shapekey with a vertex group to mask out the affected area would keep the original shape of areas that weren’t sculpted at all.
The results aren’t perfect, and it’s a convoluted workflow, but it’s usable and reasonably accurate. (Probably better not to bother with multires when sculpting on a completed basemesh unless I’m sculpting the high level details, but I didn’t know that before exploring sculpting). If nothing else, when combined with shrinkwrap this should be great for retopology).
