Got a puzzler here. My usual tact for making a low res character look better is to duplicate it, add a multiresolution modifier, sculpt it, bake out the Normal texture and apply to the low res geometry’s material.
I’ve just began the same process again but have hit a stumbling block, this model has a bit more detail than usual but the below image highlights a problem I face whereby the normal map seems to resemble the original mesh more than the sculpted mesh.
If you plan on using a subd level or 2, your best bet is to bake from multires from your highest level (4 or 5) down to 2. Instead of baking from 4 to 0. And then instead of deleting the multires and using subd, just use multires level 2 for rendering. You can delete the higher levels to free up space if you want.
So it turns out that I’d been getting lucky with my method before. What I had been doing was taking a low res character then duplicating it and sculpting on the duplicate, I would then select the image node for the normal map in the material and simply hit bake. The low res version would then have all the details via the normal map. In this case for this whale character I had to select both versions of the model and do the “selected to active” method and that has worked fine. The only difference that I can see from both scenarios was that I had a lot more detail in this model than in the previous ones, like the raised lumps on his mouth.
When you have clean topology on a mesh (like your whale) you are probably better served by using multires all the way. As opposed to duplicating. You just unwrap your base mesh, add a multires, subdivide to 2-3 and do medium muscles, then subdivude to 4 or 5 for finer details. Then you bake from the highest level, to the level you plan on rendering with. You do that by, within the multires modifer, setting preview to the level you will be ultimately be rendering with (2), and setting render to your highest level ( 4/5) after baking, save your map(s) and save a new version of the blend, then set all your multires levels to 2, and click ‘delete higher’ to free up space. YOu keep the modifier active permanantely. Usually if you want to rig it the armature goes above the multires in the stack.
