hey there, new Blender user, mostly starting to use it for Metahuman customisation without having to buy Maya, using the wonderful “Metareforge” addon
I´ve done my share of sculpting with Zbrush, but I´m not a pro and my main DCC is 3ds max.
Here are a few questions I have…
Thats actually not a Blender exclusive issues, but when subdividing triangulated meshes, like the ones Metahumans give on export, I get some undesired creases/ bumps, that makes sculpting in higher details difficult.
Higher details for the metahumans need to be baked out as normal maps anyways, so its not directly an issue. But I´m not sure how it would affect baking out normals.
Someone said that if I use Alt+J to make quads out of the tris, that wouldn´t mess up the vertex order, which I need to stay the same for the metareforge plugin to work.
Is that true?
Other than that, there is probably only the option to retopo/remesh the metahuman, so I get a cleanly subdivideable mesh, right?
I mean, as far as I see it, I would only need to make the general customization on the original mesh, so it keeps aligned with the metareforge pipeline and could simply duplicate that after I´m done with the overal shape customization.
And then retopo/remesh the duplicate to get a clean mesh to sculpt in the high details and use that to bake in the high detail normal map onto the original customized mesh with the original topology.
I´m also struggling a bit with performance. Subdividing the combined metahuman mesh to a reasonable amount for good facial detail sculpting already results in a 30 mill mesh, at witch point sculpting becomes quite sluggish.
I´ve already disabled the antialiasing and I´m using the “draw delay” option in the viewport.
What are other workflows for this?
A) Does hiding parts of the mesh make a big difference here?
B) What about separating head and body mesh?
This way I could subdivide the body mesh one more time to get the same amount of detail as in the head and then mask out the seam between body and head to avoid sculpting in this area.
But then how would I go about baking out the details for head and body, so I don´t get a visible seam around the neck?
C) Is there a difference between Multires and normal subdivision modifier in terms of performance?
Does applying either one of them before sculpting high res details result in better performance?
D) I have issues with the viewport navigation with windows ink, unless i get them resolved I´d need to get Wintab to work with my setup instead.
Are there differences in performance between Wintap and Windows Ink api?
What are some must have addons for sculpting? I guess the sculpt layers is worth its money for sure, but what else would you consider I should get?
I´m still a bit confused about the vertex paint mode, as its equivalent in Max is more what the “weight painting” mode does in blender…
I´m also used to just be able to add color to any brush as vertex color from zbrush, is there a similar workflow in Blender?
Haven´t really gotten into texture painting, but it seems thats pretty basic in Blender still, so i might as well just stick to vertex painting like I do in Zbrush for basic coloring/adding specific masks etc.
The subdivision modifier doesn’t create more geometry for sculpting the way the multires modifier does. If you’re sculpting on a mesh with subdiv, the only verts you can sculpt on are the ones that are actually present in the base mesh.
So, Blender’s multires modifier is supposed to be for sculpting, like what zbrush does, but it has a flaw: it’s performance heavy. Each level of multires you use adds to the performance cost. I find the best performance I can get out of Blender’s sculpting is by having no modifier on the object at all. You can use a subdivision modifier to get the model to the amount of polygons you need, but then, try applying the modifier. I find I get workable performance up to 30 million triangles on my computer.
I still sometimes use the multires modifier, but only at the very end of the sculpting process and only for baking purposes. It can reconstruct lower levels of subdivision from a high detail sculpt (careful though, this can crash at very high resolutions) and “bake from multires” for normal or displacement maps.
Blender will likely never have the polycount performance of Zbrush, because it’s just not the same kind of software. It’s still useful to have sculpting directly in your modeling software, but it won’t beat the specialized apps on that one aspect.
If you can hide the seam, splitting the mesh will help, because you can hide the parts you aren’t sculpting on.
The vertex paint mode and the sculpt mode’s paint tool do pretty much the same thing. They both affect color attributes. The vertex paint mode is older, while the paint tool was added more recently, to go with sculpting. The older tool might work well for coloring lower resolution models, but the newer tool is much better adapted for painting higher resolution sculpts, it’s more modern and has much better performance.
Yeah, I get it, Zbrush is a different kind of beast. But as you said: Having it all in one tool as a ton of advantages.
Really don´t get why autodesk hasn´t managed to port Mudbox over to max, I mean, they own both and pretty much nobody uses mudbox on its own these days…
So, as far as I understand, I need to apply the subdiv modifier to be able to use it for sculpting, thats what I thought.
Good to hear it might be worth for the performance.
I´m trying to avoid substance, as I really only need that stuff for personal projects, so thanks about the tip for multires baking after I added the highpoly details.
I mean, I´m also mostly using my laptop for sculpting, so I was actually pleasantly surprised how well blender still works for sculpting.
To be honest, I gotta do some more testing, because some of the performance issue may really come from windows ink and my setup, gotta do some more tests once I get wintab working properly.
I find a big advantage of doing the whole process in Blender is just how powerful the material editor is.
When I am done sculpting, I can use textures to add very fine details. I can use AO nodes to detect edges and cavities, hand painted texture masks to blend between different materials and create a material tree that’s as complex as I need. Then, I can bake that material to a simple set of textures.
This workflow is a bit complex and unintuitive for beginners, but once you realize what it can do, it becomes really powerful.
So I find I often don’t even need the same amount of detail Zbrush would give me, having both the sculpting and complex materials together in one package, whitout having to transfer the model back and forth, is worth it to me.
Oh yeah, adding procedural displacement is definitely an advantage as well.
I´ve only started using blender because of the metareforge addon, as 3ds max currently just has no way of fully customizing Metahumans.
Just bringing stuff in and out of zbrush, when working in Max is super annoying and I figured I could just start here and use blender for that stuff then…