So I encountered a problem while working on my first ever sculpt project.
I did not have any problem while sculpting the initial form. Then I retopologized my sculpt, added a new mutires, so I can add very fine detail to my mesh, but there are areas on which my brushes are not working. I am scultping a basic human, and these areas are on the sides: the hands, the side of the face, side of the thigh.
I am very frustrated since this model would be a part of a much bigger project, and I’m stuck here. Should I add a .blend file, so you guys can peek into the problem from the inside?
My theory is that there are some problems with my normals, however, when i toggle the normals disypal on they seem fine.
Oh on other thing! The Inflate/deflate bursh works even on these areas but with very strange effect, the inflate mode actually deflates, or more like flattens the volume of the fingers on the hand. The draw brush also works in a very freaky way: It flattens the fingers and then bends them. Cool effect, but not at all what I am looking for
I’d apprechiate any kind of help and indeas on fixing the problem.
Sounds like you have inverted normals. Edit mode, select all, recalc normals from tools. Check them. As for sculpting acting weird you need good topology to sculpt in multires. This means squareish quads, no/few tris. Few poles. And good edge flow. Post the blend, or at least some screenshots of wireframes.
Thanks for the reply, but I tried to recalc multiple times, the normals are all facing the correct way, plus I think my retopo wan not bad, I am aware of the things you mentioned. This is the topo of the hand and the face, plus the facing of the normals. I know it’s not perfect, but is not bad either. At least not bad enough to cause problems. I was really going for zero tri-s, I read blender master class, so I’m really working in that philosophy, still somehow it’s not working. Any other ideas?
Ok, here’s your problem. The topology. You have too many faces, and those faces you do have are badly elongated and have inconsistant and arbitrary density. This will destroy your chances for sculpting. You have poles connected to poles. You do not have good edge flow. There’s an area to left of the mouth that juts up oddly. The lips have enormous faces next to tiny ones. When this is subdivided in a multires it’s unworkable. In my opinion, you need to retopo this from scratch.
I highly recommend the blender cookie realistic head/female head series.
This is a female I created following that series, with solid topology and is sculpt ready. See how few verts there are, this allows for much higher multi-res levels to be achieved.
Returning to the original problem of brushes not working, make sure your model’s scale is uniform and best of all unit, i.e. (1,1,1). Non-uniform scale skews normals which adversely affects sculpting brushes.
So I guessed my original sculpt and retopo was not good enough so I restarted the whole project, struggled with sculpting, since I only used boxmodelling tools so far, but you know… practice makes perfect, so after about my 4th attempt, I felt like my scult is accepteable for retopo.
I moved on to retopo with all the gathered info from some tutorials. Here is the retopo. I figured I will not continue until I ask the opinion of you guys.
Definitely much better. In my opinion you still have too many loops around the eyes and mouth though. When the mesh is that dense you will get pinching. It’s too tight.
It’s much easier (and faster) to retopo (and unwrap) with fewer (larger and more squarish) faces. Less is definitely more here. Remember, multires will give you plenty of opportunity and plenty of geometry to get super fine details (skin pores) at the higher levels. The retopo is just a jumping off point, a silhouette.
Now I think you’re fine with what you have. I would recommend selecting every other (or at least every third) edge loop around the ultra dense regions and ‘x’ limited dissolve. Then select dense regions and ‘w’ relax and w ‘smooth’.
