So basically there are two issues that i encountered while sculpting that I cant solve at the same time which are high detailed Alpha textures while keeping sharp edges on a sculpt.
When I want to achieve detailed alpha textures I use remesh but it destroys some of the sharp edges on the sculpt
So I tried to use the Multiresolution modifier which keeps the all the edges sharp but apparently even at higher poly numbers then the remesh it reproduces horrible alpha textures
How can I achieve both of them at the same time?
Is the Multiresolution bad for small details and alpha textures?
Maybe the topology on that edge isn’t right? or the remesh tool has its limits?
Thanks to everyone who comments and helps
the blender file is attached below.
The issue is that your topology isn’t suited for sculpting. Optimum sculpting topology requires (relatively) evenly spaced/evenly sized square quads.
Here you have huge rectangles and very small rectangles. You basically have the least suitable sculpting topology.
Every time you subdivide each quad gets split in 4, so by the time you get to a high subdiv level you have a massive mismatch of quad sizes, which is what you’re seeing when you try to add alphas.
To make this sculptable topology you would either have to use a quad remesh and project method or a very high voxel remesh. Or manually clean up the topology by adding evenly quaded edgeloops. Or you could add dense topo to the areas where the alphas are going with dyntopo.
ohh ok, thank you for highlighting the issues and elaborating further. I’ll try and play with the topology to fix it as you suggested.
Can you comment about the issue with the alpha textures being a mess using multires as well?(oh okay thanks I see where the issues is for some reason I thought it would subdivide it differently from the regular subdivision surface modifier)
This one here is just down to the underlying nature of the topology. It’s common and expected. There are tools to deal with this in Zbrush like polish and polygroups and others,but I’m not sure what the equivalent tools are in Blender.
This is the remeshed mesh as opposed to the multires one which i the other picture. I just smooth the remeshed alpha texture and it gets rid of the irregularities in the edges.
Yes, the remeshed mesh has quaded sculpting topology. If smoothing works for you then that’s great. But it won’t always be the case so it’s good to know why it’s happening.
Some details are too complex and are a bit easier to produce with alpha textures which I can design in Photoshop and Illustrator. But thats a valid point and maybe for some occasions a preferred route that I should choose instead knowing now what I know. Thank you.
You can easily turn your alphas in geometry. Create them on a perfectly sqaure and quaded flat subdivided grid and extract them to a mesh with thickness.
