Start sculpting (a dane) with blender tools

Hi all.
Today I decided to take a chance on sculpting. I’ve never sculpt anything before today. I’m using Blender quite seriusly for about an year.
Now I can model pretty simple things and I’am pretty comfortable with blender UI. I think to have learned the basic principles of the software.

After having seen yet another wonderful sculpt I decided to make a test.

Two days ago I posted a great dane sketch so, I’ve used this fresh material as reference for my model.
I’ve watched some basic tutorial, specially one in which they say not to start with a simple cube but with an already subdivided mesh.
I’ve built then a primitive mesh and I’ve applied subdiv modifier to it. I’ve studied a bit of topology in order to build a “not-totally-crap” base model. I ended up with a pretty simple model with no tris and some n-gons.
Later, just before starting sculpt something, I applied the modifier, stacked the multires one and subdivided two times.
Main shapes and volumes were already been defined in the polygon modeling phase, so I’ve used sculpting tools for adding a first level of details and for better defining flows, just for familiarize with main brushes.

This is the result. http://vimeo.com/28483187

I’m pretty happy with it. But, while scuplting, I’ve encounter difficulties in the places where there is an n-gon. I tend to think that the underlying mesh topology is wrong.

This is a wire of the starting model. I’ve colored the point where I think there’s the main mistake.



Someone can give me an advice on how to fix this topology? And, what do you think about the sculpt? The workflow I used is correct or there are better solutions?

The sculpt is really good! I can’t make a dog in blender if my life depended on it, however, i dont think you can fix the “topology”. because if you tried to you might mess it up.

What you want to be able to do is to redirecting mesh flow:

http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m626/cabby24/Blender%20Pics%202011/mesh_flow.png

Here is good tutorial on the subject.

Thank you ridix. This is exactly what I was looking for. This is a great tutorial…
I’ll try to fix the topology.
I don’t understand your pics… Those are 2 different solutions for the problem? I’ve to chose the one who fit my flow or something else?

By the way, tnx again.

When you pick an edge to rotate, you can rotate CW or CCW. That will give you two different solutions. Pick the one you want.

I strongly recommend you make the entire base mesh before you start sculpting. While it’s not impossible to add the rest later, it’s not exactly trivial and inevitably leads to some small loss of sculpt data.