Sculpting with shape keys -- super laggy?

Hey all, I’m an intermediate Blender user who has been learning to sculpt in the program. I’ve always wished that Blender had layers for sculpting that could be toggled on and off. Today I suddenly thought that I could achieve something like this using shape keys. It basically works – however, the problem is that I immediately start to experience lag whenever I sculpt using a shape key. Of course the more complex the sculpt the worse the lag is. What a bummer!

I’m guessing this is just a limitation of the way that shape keys have to calculate interactions with the base mesh, and that’s just going to cause lag no matter what. However I thought maybe I’d ask on here and see if anyone has any ideas – I’m not that knowledgeable about shape keys so there might be some setting I’m missing that’s causing the lag. Or some workaround for getting toggleable “layers” for sculpting some other way. Thanks!

I have nearly no expierence in sculpting and cant answer that but take a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWS5Ymb_PXM
Maybe you do something wrong and/or you hardware is to low for it.

Thanks for the reply. Fortunately the guy who did that YouTube video provides his dog mesh so that I could download it and investigate. The dog is a very low poly simple mesh, which is why he doesn’t get much lag when sculpting on a shape key. I can recreate that just fine on my PC, which is decently powerful. As soon as you subdivide the mesh a bit then suddenly you start encountering tons of lag when sculpting on a shape key. It only lags when sculpting on a shape key – I can sculpt just fine with a subdivided mesh if I delete the shape key. Seems to be some limitation of the way shape keys work… who knows! Thanks again though.