I must say this thing is incredibly fun! I can’t wait till we can edit meshes and add shapekeys with multires meshes, then we can really have a great use for sculpting in all the detail. Or it would be cool if we could use sculpt mode to make normal maps. But anyways, it’s really fun, and has brought me a heaping ammount of joy. So, this is just a head I was having fun with. I took a relatively simple key mesh, then upped the level to 5. To get good performance I ran blender in Ubuntu with fluxbox.
Unfortunately, you can’t have shape keys with multires on. You’ll have to do an entire facial rig without shape keys (which is very difficult) if you want to animate this. I think there’s already a normal map generator for high poly meshes- I forget where though.
That’s the point I was making, at this stage I can’t use shape keys, or further edit my base mesh, thus it’s really not too useful right now unless I’m making a static statue. However, I hope in the latter versions of blender, these tools are improved so that I can use them with shape keys and whatnot. I’ll have to look into that normal map generator however, because that would be extremely useful!
I haven’t used the sculpt mode much … or done much modelling for that matter at all :), but
once the mesh is completed, could you not press the “Apply Multires” button, and then maybe add a decimate modifier and maybe a subsurf modifer with the optimal settings (to reduce the vert count while retaining the shape), then start creating shape keys?
Mike
Mike_S, Yes you can always apply the multires, but then you get a very high poly mesh, and rigging and animating that will be a real pain. As weird as it sounds, the goal of hipoly subd modeling is actually to keep your poly count as low as possible. it’s much easier to manage less vertexes for adding shape keys and whatnot. However, you can start sculpting something from a hipoly cube, then if you get something you like you can use the retopo tool to create a nice clean mesh.
Start petition for pixel displacement modifier!
If you want normal maps from your sculpt model you might want to look at DeNormGen (DE Normal Map Generator). Latest version is v1.5. It’s small and easy standalone program for Windows and Linux and it has Python export script for blender. Some users have reported having better quality results with it compared to other normal map generators. Denormgen can also generate displacement maps.
You need two extra dll files for it to work in windows (libpng13.dll and zlib1.dll) just extract those to denormgen directory.
Tutorials are quite scarce for this program but there are tips and help in the forum.
Basically you just have to have roughly similarly shaped low-res and hi-res objects in blender scene both together and object names must be set to somename.low and somename.hi accordingly (object meshes can have holes but it slows normal map generation down a bit as far as I can tel). Low-res object has to have UV-coordinates and blank image texture applied to the first texture channel for it (size of this texture defines the normal map image size). Then you just have to select both of the objects and export denormgens .dim file using the included Python script.
Denormgen itself is very easy to use, just open your exported file and generate normal / displacement maps using either tangent- or object-space. After a while you get the results that can be reviewed in denormgen and saved as an .PNG normal map image.
Doesn’t zlib1.dll come with Blender?
Or maybe that was just zlib without the 1…
Decimating kind of defeats the point of sculpting in the first place 
That would wipe off every fine detail created, even at a high setting. Not to mention that at a high setting the vert count would still be way to high to modify by hand.
I didn’t realize you meant that you couldn’t wait for the feature, I thought you meant you couldn’t wait to add the keys yourself.
DENormGen! That’s what I was talking about. I’ve never used it, but it looks really useful.
Editmode could potentially be much faster if Blender drew it with a much more recent and faster version of OpenGL. I think I heard somewhere that some OpenGL refactor has been done for metaballs and curves.
Yes Blenders zlib.dll might work too if copied to DeNormGen directory and renamed to zlib1.dll. Zlib.dll is used for compression/decompression and zlib1.dll is used for compression only (if I understand it correctly).
I just prefer to have right files if some app asks for a specific dll library.
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hey, is there a way to use pressure sensitivity to adjust the strength setting? that’d be great…
I believe you can create a normal map of the hi-res mesh using the new render-baking funcationality:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/render-baking/
This page deals with texture baking, but you can do the same thing with a normal map:
http://b2cs.delcorp.org/index.php/Using_blender’s_texture_baking_tool
Get you hi-res mesh finished, UV unwrap it, create a new image in the image/UV editor, render bake the normal map, then assign it as a normal map texture, and lower the multi-res to lower resolution.
I’m just going off memory here, but I hope that helps.