Dynamesh is apparently dynamic remeshing as you sculpt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPVVPa-zsjo
So Dynamesh is not exactly the same as Sculptris.
Yeah, it was more of a general rant. I didn’t even expect you to answer.
I’ve been using Mudbox for a long time, and quite recently switched to Zbrush, never used Blender for sculpting.
With the recent changes though the sculpting mode looks really good. The possibilities are really comparable to Mudbox and there’s
radial symetry unlike Mudbox, the remesh modifier is about allright.
Dynamic topology is definitely a great thing too.
As I said the performance is not nearly enough to me.
I have VBOs enabled, tried disabling undo while subdividing in multires (in was in 2.49 manual don’t know if it’s still needed),
tried starting with a higher poly base.
Most of the times it was resposive to about 300k poly’s, with multires. About 1m with no modifiers.
Beyond that the lag was too big.
I have a Geforce GTS450, 8 gigs ram, and 4 core Athlon something.
It’s not a high-end pc but it’s enough for a couple of million polys in Zbrush.
Basically, the more like Sculptris you can make it, the better. Although my PC can really only handle about 1M polys smoothly on either one, sculptris feels a LOT smoother for the same # of polys. Why is this?
Thank you for this response nicholasbishop!
It smells like something surprisingly good is cooking here.
BTW, I didn’t mean that I’m a fun of dynamesh. But it does work for me. Dynamesh is like remesh modifier but it’s much more powerful and still really fast on ~1.5 M meshes. Dynamesh also uses quads and ~10% tris. This sounds a little odd but it isn’t really. Produces better shapes this way. It is also supported by boolean like tools, making it capable for hard surfacing.
It sounds weird but the ability of stretching the mesh and then asking for remeshing it isn’t too bad either. Produces some interesting crisp shapes. Difficult for me to explain it further using words.
I didn’t make it clear, it seems so. I still remain a fun of sculptris. Excellent choice for sketching - doodling on portraits. Its few nice tools is all I need. Especially the crease tool, please pay attention on how it behaves, ± modes.
What is essential in Sculptris is the way you can control the density as working. The basic tutorial. Try to keep density as low as possible. Having some smooth transition between hi and lo density areas. Some believe that you can have very low density areas on a sculpt. This is wrong, imagine what may happen after retopology and baking.
There’s the third road of course, it’s 3dcoat/voxels. Too heavy for the machines but ideal for directly cutting on digital clay, boolean operations, terrains, rocks. A “real” digital clay. Tools aren’t that great though, IMHOpinion of course.
What I’m trying to say is this: there isn’t one only way to sculpt. Sometimes sculptris is great, jump to zbrush remesh and continue there, or jump to 3dcoat and continue with dynamic tessellation (Farsthary’s work there, let you work at 3-6 millions when sculptris stops practically at ~1.5M and crashes at 2.5).
Or, as last night, I had lot of fun with box modeling and some blender sculpting, ~100k then, suddenly I jumped into zbrush.
Or start with the beautiful skin modifier and jump to sculptris (excellent assist for Sc, zspheres is rather a failure in this case).
Or just import in blender/cycles and after a few tests, I can still edit the mesh, a bit.
I’m a little collector of 3d sculpting apps. The more I have the better I feel. It’s like traditional painting. I love oil colors, watercolors, egg tempera, pastels, my simple pencils etc. It depends on the day. LOL
More information on dynamesh, watch these classroom videos on the second row of zbrush main forum.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/forumdisplay.php?2-ZBrush-Main-Forum
About sculptris dynamic tessellation behavior of tools, it’s something like this:
Dynamesh and sculptris are two TOTALLY different things. Dynamesh is an option you turn on in zbrush that allows you to control+click outside of the mesh to automatically create an all quads recreation of the original at a preset resolution. It is much more accurate with details than the current remesh option and, more importantly, can be used to combine two or more sculpted meshes into one continuous mesh.
nicholasbishop
sorry I should have done my research better,thanks for your response.
michalis
did a high pressure test some while ago;
I am able to work in the ~6 million triangles range in Sculptris
those specs are more than unusual for productive sculpting but its possible to push further than 2,5M 
a few things to note when you are having a win 7 pc;
modify your sculptris settings (config.txt ) for example set how many threads are used
use a small matcap 128x128 px or even smaller
unlock the 32bit limitations http://ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php
close all other programs you might have opened
you have to safe often in that high triangle area because you might hit the new ram limitation pretty fast around 5 million triangles
(happens when you are changing the actual project way to much)
it gets really slow when you try to draw or grab (can go down to 3 fps) but thats mostly because of a slowdown of the harddisk.
when you move the mouse a bit slower you will have higher frame rates… and if you put Sculptris into your Ram and the fps will be higher.
I think that 64bit would allow the user to get a bit further with Dyntopo than 32 bit?
Nicholasbishop,dynamesh works good,but you need a projection tool after the remesh.
Without it you lose resolution(and details),projection is the main reason why dynamesh works well,because you can change topology keeping the detailing work done previously.
I’m curios to see where you’ll go with this tool,last time I tried I had a really negative feeling about it(you are a great coder but it was so difficult to do something decent for me that I avoided to test it more(but it was something like an year ago,I hope things are improved a bit from there))
Can you explain what is wrong ?
I did a quick test with a model on wich i made an extreme difference in mesh density in some areas
Then i baked the normal map onto the low poly retopo
And i don’t see anything wrong in the render ?
I did some tests with sculptris, at the beginning the performance was about the same as
Blender so smooth 300k laggy 1m.
I changed the config file (mt_maxthreads 5) , switched power management to highest
performance and applied the 4gb patch.
Now I get workable 5 million polys and at 20 m it works similarly to Blender at 1m.
@Sanctuary
Yes I see,
You used smoothing when baking, losing some crisp details. It’s OK for normal maps.
But, try displacement maps and use cycles. Or just import the sculptris mesh and render it.
Lot of zbrush users may not noticed that similar issue exists there, when baking. Under render menu / smooth normals is the solution. I still don’t quite like the results. Subdividing >4-8 M is the best.
I don’t expect to see such an engine in blender. Zb does its magics, but with a cost. Try to handle a rather dense retopo cage and see what I mean. We can’t compare these two apps.
About sculptris config file, I’m on a mac pro. It correctly says 16 threads by default. OSX 10.6.8 will normally provide 4 GB on 32 bit apps. But, I use a cheap Nvidia, unfortunately. Waiting for the news to upgrade to something expensive. LOL
BTW you probably noticed that stopping symmetry in sculptris will suddenly hit performance.
At the same time, on the same hardware, 3dcoat/UnlimitedClay mode, I can handle 10M easily. It’s an 64bit app, you see.
Let’s be reasonable, a 4M dynamically tessellated mesh is something huge. The equivalent of a 10-20 M ZB mesh
I don’t think dyntopo highpoly performance is as important as normal sculpt mode, because it would normally only be used to sculpt large / mid size forms before retpopologizing and taking the mesh into normal sculpt mode, where the tiny details would be sculpted.
This is in the normal sculpt mode, right? I have a GTS250, 8GB ram and an i7 and I get a smooth enough viewport even at 10,000,000 polys. You might already know but OpenGL performance is terrible on Geforces higher than 300’s.
This is in the normal sculpt mode, right? I have a GTS250, 8GB ram and an i7 and I get a smooth enough viewport even at 10,000,000 polys. You might already know but OpenGL performance is terrible on Geforces higher than 300’s.
Makes sense.
This is in the normal sculpt mode, right? I have a GTS250, 8GB ram and an i7 and I get a smooth enough viewport even at 10,000,000 polys. You might already know but OpenGL performance is terrible on Geforces higher than 300’s.
OK I have a lower nvidia than 300 (gt 220), still terrible.
Other apps, like sculptris or 3dcoat have no difficulties on this.
What are we try to do here, to test any hardware under blender? Is this right?
OK I have a lower nvidia than 300 (gt 220), still terrible.
Other apps, like sculptris or 3dcoat have no difficulties on this.
What are we try to do here, to test any hardware under blender? Is this right?
Maybe we should buy a Radeon for the viewport and a GeForce to take the full advantage of Cycles? 
better thing … sculpt in the render mode of cylces to get advantages of cuda… :RocknRoll:
You didn’t bother checking if it’s possible did you?
it was a really stupid idea, its far much worse than trying to model in that mode,
you have to sculpt then go into the edit mode every time and since you can´t see the made changes in Rendermode, its getting pretty much useless.
in conclusion its not really possible nor useful since Blender needs to reload the whole mesh in the BVH stage.
In the following build from Graphicall
7513_blender-r48505-dyntopo-x86
does anybody else have the problem that in *Viewport Shading - Material the mesh wont get updated when Dynamic is activated?
Cycles Render
Viewport SHading - Material
Someone tried to sculpt a head with details with that dynamic topology function ?
How is performance in comparison to sculpting a head in Sculptris by example ?
Dyntopo branch crashes too easily to be able to obtain a result.
I am always forgotting what brushes to avoïd.
Each time, I try a grab or clay brush or to use a brush after disabling dyntopo and it crashes.
I should try with mesh bigger than default cube.
About local density, I think a per-brush density slider with a toggle button to make it related to brush size would be good. But it make sense a higher detail slider for inflate or smooth only if lower faces are not deleted.
If it should stay global maybe it should be a layer or level option.
Unfortunately I don’t have any such sculptors handy, so we’ll just have to stick with text-based forums messages for now
They are not using dyntopo.
But I know a forum where a guy compile lots of sculpting videos (blender, zbrush or sculptris).
http://www.3dsaloon.fr/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1302
Edit: I really try to make an head but each time, I decrease detail size; I need to smooth low detailed zone.
It creates boundaries with deleted faces and if I return to object mode, it crashes.
Hi Nicholas, my suggestion is having it controlled by the viewport zoom factor, I mean:
I do one stroke with all my mesh displayed in the viewport and I got a certain amount of dynamic subdivision with few edges created, but if I zoom a lot in the viewport to make blender show only that very area that needs extra details I should be able to make a stroke which creates more details in that area, and when I zoom further in I should be able to create even more details…
I don’t know whether this makes sense at all 
but this could lead to general common option, peraphs?