I’m wanting to do a scene with a close up of oil paints and brushes and such but I’m wondering if there isn’t an easier better way to make the paint blobs than making a super high poly icosphere and sculpting it. I want this to be photo real, so they will need creases and a portion of the paint to be smeared onto the pallet in a short streak.
Something like this, but I will be making like 25 of them in a square grid. Can this be done without making them high poly?
You could use subsurf modifier for the main shape, and then maybe use a bump texture to get the small details.
That’s a really good idea. I like to keep the majority of the rendering on the gpu and I think when you have tons of geometry it forces the cpu to render, or at least that’s how I understand it. What about the streaks coming from the blobs? Think I should use geometry or a texture on the pallet? I worry that the texture on the pallet won’t mesh well with the blobs, as I would like to add bump to that. I don’t know how seamless that would look with those blobs.
You could create a mask for the palette material to separate it into a wood material and a color material. That way you could assign the same material for the mesh and the color smears on the palette. Should weld together (optically) pretty well 
many ways to do that
you could use the meatball and shape it too
or use lattice to modify Uvsphere
have fun with blobs
happy bl