Hi, I’m working on this mask to be 3D printed, it is roughly 18cm tall.
I am not too happy with the grainy/low poly look, the triangles will probably be visible at 3D printing.
1: I’m undecided if I want it as part of the aesthethic or not, feedback welcome.
2: What would be the best, or rather, fastest, way to make the model look more smooth (by smooth, I mean it in laymans terms, not blender terms) without loosing too much of the sharper features? I have tried some smoothing modifiers, some up the polycount by a lot:
3: is there not limits to how much polygons a slicer can handle?
others again smooth the sharp edges too much, looks like it melted.
4: is there a way to smooth the flatter areas but leaving sharper corners alone?
I find sculpting it more smooth by hand is very time intensive, and I don’t think that workflow would be sustainable if I want to make more models like this.
Really, it all depends on how much work you want to do…
Have you tried using blender remesh modifier and setting it to smooth. It’s not a great tool honestly, but as a way to quickly remesh it in quads, it’s ok, and I’ve used it a few times whilst sculpting.
Just mess with the settings to increase the density a little, and then you can go back into sculpt mode, and use crease and pinch to re-sharpen some of the edges if the detail is lost.
obviously, you could completely re-topologise it manually and then sculpt some of the finer details back in.
Most slicers are limited to your RAM and CPU when slicing. So poly count doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re not taking the piss. I’ve sliced models with pretty high poly counts before (in the millions) just fine.
observing that the model does not contain too many details “on the skin” I would advise you to do a remesh with some available tools (I would try more than one to see which one you get a more faithful result)
remesh modifier?
decimate modifier?
quadremesh?
voxel remesh?
same remesh addon?
the best thing would be to do a manual retopology … but it’s probably a little more challenging …
… and then apply the subdivision surface modifier …
