This problem has been bothering me for a while and I can’t seem to find much info about it.
It happens when I use the Clay Strips and small Crease brushes like I did in this picture.
Why do these weird horizontal lines(that look like scanlines) appear on my sculp?
First I thought it needed more tris, but it is already at 10 mil tris…
You can really see the “damage” in the normal map that has been baked both inside the wood as on the crevices inbetween…
@Gordyne , hi there. Similar issues happen to me for the lack of geometry, as you hinted as well. No matter if you have tris or quads, if you sculpt from any side angle, you will most likely see these little breaks, as the faces are moved at another direction, other than they would normally connect. You can try to check normals, merge by distance, shade smooth, etc… the usual stuff.
Still, I think it is most likely an issue of the angles, as it happens on the sides mostly. Will you decimate the geometry later, or want to bake it over a low poly object?
Bake it to a low poly, since it’s for a game.
I’ve tried increasing poly count, but in this pic it was already in the 10+ million tris.
I might be wrong but there is something about the Clay Strips brush that always makes these lines
Seems to be smoother if you sculpt in a diagonal line, but just barely…
Well, if tri-s are that much seeming “zig-zagged”, sculpt quads only I guess. Dynotypo will create tris, so I would not click that, merely subdivide and use the multires modifier, that works under sculpting. If you don’t have tris, it should be better I guess.
There is another solution, to go procedural, and create the wood as a procedural texture, no sculpting, just plug it into a displacement node without touching the mesh at all (OK, maybe subdivide ofc). There are great wood tutorials that can work with displacement as well, and might even provide better results:
You may like this:
And this:
I know it’s not really, what you wanted, but might help as an alternative 
Thanks.
Turns out that, at least for the Clay Strips Brush, I found the solution in a tiny corner of the internet:
Set Brush Spacing to 1%
This should be pinned everywhere for the blender community to see, lol it’s such an annoyance.
On a serious, note, 1% should be the default for this Brush, so that people avoid the pesky lines…
