Some Questions regarding Sculpt and Blender Optimized Builds

Support Basics & Interface
1

Sculpting:

  1. This one is about mesh hiding. I’ve seen someone saying that one can hide part of the mesh using Alt+B combination. And there is also a Ctrl+Shift+(drag to select the part one wants to be hidden). So I am wondering what’s the difference (I felt better performance using second method), and why people use first method?

  2. I sculpted a head (sort of) retopologised it, and tried to sculpt more detail to the retopologised mesh. But when I reached a higher poly count and tried to hide some parts of the mesh to improve performance it DID NOT work. I mean, when I try to hide any part of it, All mesh disappears (I can bring it back with Alt+H). I tried to append it in new files but it didn’t work too … It seems like the mesh is “corrupted”. If anyone is willing to help me and take a look at it here is the .blend file with the mesh. Thanks in advance!

    Optimized Builds:

I have a PC which supports SSE2, thus I downloaded The optimized build from Graphicall.org.
I suppose I need to unpack all the files to the blender directory? And I wonder what are the disadvantages of those optimized builds? I mean, file compatibility, negative effect on some of the blender features, etc. And maybe anyone knows if this build gives any performance boost to sculpting?

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to answer your question regarding the optimized build: i’ve been using eugene’s optimized build since it came out, and never had a problem with it. The files are perfectly compatible with regular 2.43. However i can’t say for sure that the optimzied build will not cause ANY trouble. Although personally i’ve been very happy with the build.
The way it’s compiled, basically everything gets a speed boost: rendering, sculpt, fluid sim…even game runtimes.

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Yeah, it’s all the exact same code, it’s just speaking a different machine language to the processor, SSE2, instead of regular old, multi-purpose machine language. For computers that can understand SSE2 commands, it’s much faster and more accurate.

4

Great, Thank you very much, as I thought I wont get an answer here, I installed the optimized build and also had no problems with it. Anyway, thanks for a good explanation!

Sculpting questions still remain unanswered :slight_smile: …