Sadly, animating sculpting not considered enough.
Good looking sculpts with messy topology; it might get you to the ‘featured image’ area. But, for animation workflow, it is useless.
For animation, a sculpting needs to be prepared for a subdiv+displace workflow. For this purpose, multires and displacement baking is essential.
For games characters or models you never animate sculpting, your character is sculpted in T pose like and that’s it.
Then rigging and animation are made on the low poly retopo model.
While some games might have used lower resolution levels directly instead of doing retopo, but that’s not the most used workflow for games.
I guess most people here are using sculpting mode for very different things than mine, i mean using the lower rez levels as retopo models for animation that’s why you need so much multi rez.
You say yourself. After sculpting, you need to do a retopology. To ensure, that animation deformations are maintainable. And after you got low-res model, you do paint textures, rig it, and you are done?
If you are content with it, I see your point. Multires wont be needed. But if you actually like to get details into your animated char, you already rely on a baking workflow. And Multires is the tool of choice to achieve it.
In my own workflow I use Multires not for animating, but as a tool to add and maintain details to a mesh which does work for animation deforms. Multires sculpt based files are still large monsters. Might work for single objects, but if you have many of them, you sacrifice memory.
To get usable, a Multires-Monser sculpting needs to slim down. So, I do need to get rid of Multires by baking its geometry to displacement maps. Multires did its job. It helped me maintain masses of geometry data. And still Multires relies on topology, which ensures quality displacement baking.
After displacements and normals are baked, a sculpting which consumes many Gigabytes of data boils down to few dozens of megabytes.
@Ratchet, this whole discussion you are leading is based on talking at cross purposes. The thing @Musashidan is and was criting is your sentence that dynamic changes should be implemented in Multirez modeling and that it is not just useful for adding micro details, and as a reason for not mixing that he brought up, that he’s at least partially requested to deliver his work based on that in a non-destructive manner and multiresolution lends itself to that. And while that sentence is rather targeting on the status quo in some or many production pipelines and not that much on other characteristics or possibilities of multires modeling itself, you never even tried to respond to that at all.
Instead you try to demonstrate that not every workflow or usecase is in need of multires editing, what certainly is also true, but simply not the point. It doesn’t say anything about if there’s a need for multires modeling, nor does it say how multires modeling should be.
For EEVEE, using Vertex Color node in material is sufficient.
Now, Vertex Color node only handles Sculpt Vertex Color Channels.
For Cycles, you have to create a regular vertex color channel.
Then, in sculpt mode, you have to press Store Sculpt Vertex Color button.
( I don’t understand why button is not available in other modes.I wish I was able to enable it in Shading Tab that uses Object mode.)
Then, you can use regular vertex color channel in EEVEE and Cycles through Attribute node.
UI is currently confusing. I think that Vertex Color channels list should be renamed Attribute Vertex Colors or Vertex Color node should be renamed Sculpt Vertex Color.
Because currently, we have a vertex color node that does correspond to Vertex Colors list.
And next to that, we have a problem with Display of Regular attribute vertex color display.
There is no way to display it in Solid mode, now.
Sculpt Vertex Colors are always taking priority.
So, user may paint something in Vertex Paint Mode. But using Vertex Color for viewport shading in Solid mode will continue to be relative to Sculpt Vertex Colors.
We currently have no way to choose. We are forced to go into Material Preview or Rendered mode.
That is annoying if you use attribute Vertex Paint to create masks in material.
We can no longer use Solid View to inspect one channel and Material Preview for the final result.
Pablo quickly fixed problems with masks and face sets.
I have no more display glitches and automasking is working with both.
I did some tests. It’s particularly Cycles that behaves strange when using vertex colors in the latest 2.9 alpha. I filed a bug report.
Eevee seems to work fine though:
there are different workflows, we get it, I also can give you many examples where you can not finish model without multires. if you working for cinimatic usually you have pre-established pipeline base mesh that you CAN’T change as said @Musashidan
for games like Uncharted you also need base mesh with subd levels, they making blendshapes on it and baking wrinkles normal map for expressions. Also for arms movement they do the same (normal map for fist for example).
It is getting offtopic , let’s finish it.
Multires + performance + layers sculpting +brush manegment + painting 8k bump maps for pores with good performance, and I will be happy=)
Some time ago Pablo Dobarro mentioned a sculpt-to-displacement-map workflow.
Many years ago Michalis tried to point out, that vector displacement maps would help to get better matching displacement. That time, I think, this theme sadly was not trendy enough to get noticed or considered.
But, I think, baking displacement vector map is a very important tool. Myself, I ran into problems on baking Oicho sculpt. It has an artifact on its wing due to normal based displacement baking. I had to mask that area away from displacement map.
I might have been not understood this way his talk about multi rez.
Zbrush subdivision is basic usage, i just use it and i don’t need to keep lower subdivision levels as i don’t go into nano details.
For my needs only the baked low poly model matters.
That’s a common workflow for game models, the retopo is to optimize as much as possible the polycount for game engine with good polygon flow for animations also.
Using lower subdivision models would still be too high poly for a game model or sometimes would not have good topology for animation.
Making yourself retopo is even more needed for mobile games using baked models.
And i guess your retopo model from multi rez still keeps a big amount of polygons beyond what current game engines could handle in a real game enviroment level ?
About Retopo 3D coat has automatic very efficient tools and InstantMesh integration.
Well, it seems you only care about your needs… that is pretty obvious.
Have you ever worked with other people?
You go on showing pictures and pointing to link which seem refers to lots of things read, not experienced.
And, quite clearly too, you don’t seem to care a damn fuck about quality…
Instant meshes is a shit for artist workflow. It has been created by prof. Jakob on completely different purposes: to retopologize scans from real objects in a very quick way, and it does its job pretty well. BUT NOT FOR ARTS.
Edit: but not for arts. No shouting, please.
Rather not. Years ago this might be true, so I had to create a second model to achieve fluid movements. If you render sequences, you still rely on time-accurate interactive rendering. Graphic cards improved a lot. You wont get your job done with a Its-tea-time-workflow.
The purpose is different. I think it is ok if you conclude for yourself, that you do not need Multires. But it seems you rather generalized, that other features are more important and Multires should be put back.
Imo, Multires is among elemental features other features build on, not other way around.
Putting multires into waiting loop would thread workflows which rely on multires. I think this is the reason your last comments faced much rejection.
Zbrush subdivision is basic usage, i just use it and i don’t need to keep lower subdivision levels as i don’t go into nano details.
For my needs only the baked low poly model matters.
Stop making this about your specific bespoke workflows as if they’re some sort of counterargument to folks that need their workflows supported.
Not a single goddamn one of us cares how little you need multires and layers to work. In fact I know you’ve already noticed you are pissing literally everybody off.
Instant meshes is like quite some other approaches a quad dominant retopo algorithm with feature alignment, guide placement and a quite good prevention of singularities. Time doesn’t stand still and research still goes on here, Instant meshes is used quite easily/often as it came with an reference implementation and a simple built commandline usable binary, and while neither the algorithm itself nor the binary were perfect, other approaches aren’t either, but it’s intention and it’s goal isn’t really different from other published quad dominiant remeshing methods, so I don’t know why you think it does a shit for artists workflows.
Btw. Quadriflow is heavily based on Instant meshes.
Yeah, there is a ton of high to low asset work that doesn’t demand complex deformation. Lots of games these days take place in mountainous areas with tons of rocks, that’s exactly what this kind of stuff is the best at.
Are you guys able to paint vertex paint with multires? I cant get it to work. If its not posible rigth now, do you know if it is planned to implement it? I am still amazed how fast painting vertex is now, thank you Dobarro.
Sculpt Vertex colors can now be rendered directly by Cycles
https://developer.blender.org/rB890336849071dd716bc254edbbfa474ed9e61432
Actually, you can paint as many layers as you want.
But EEVEE does not support a mix of vertex color nodes like Cycles do.
It is not working in master. It is planned.
Pablo started to work on that, yesterday.
https://developer.blender.org/D8104
He has a video up now too. It is not quite PTex, but it will come pretty close if paired with a high resolution sculpt. 
