I wanted to get an idea of how far you guys have gotten with pushing the limits of sculpting in your own projects and works?
Have you set up a scene with multiple high poly characters?
Are there ways and steps to boost performance
when sculpting?
Id also love to know what are your computers and devices you use and specs to achieve your results.
I have an ipad pro with nomad sculpt and its really good but im probably gonna need another computer or laptop for general use. And i figured since computers/laptops would be more powerful they should yield bigger and better results for sculpting and allow for more flexibility and less limitations. So id love to know how far blender can be pushed.
i’ve done in the hundreds of millions (not quite a billion) in bryce3d back when, which did pull the 386 cpu (and mebbe 8g mem?) to a crawl. it did render finally though. haven’t been close to that again since, but i’m sure i will.
my biggest 2 in blender are “munchkinland” (aka Blendoodle 0169): (16mil tris)
In Blender, when I wasn’t going high just to prove a point or test something? Maybe ten or 15 mill. That’s all I’ve ever really needed, and unless I’m doing pores or somesuch I need far less. Take my numbers with a grain of salt for judging performance, I have (even on computers with less in them than my current) had an unusually good experience with blender and sculpting poly count before hitting lag.
Talking purely sculpting? No. I work on a single character/object at a time. For animation or still renders? Eh? It depends on what you mean by high poly. With all the subdiv modifiers turned on the characters alone can get up into the millions easy, but I usually use proxy meshes until I need to run simulations or renders, to stop things from bogging down.
Currently, I’m using a laptop with 64Gb ram, and a gpu that (I think) has 16 GB on it. I don’t know any technical specs beyond that. It does what I need it to do, and it’s pretty easy to take apart when I need to clean out the fans. (The air flow is garbage, keep that in mind if you go laptop. There are some that decided being a quarter inch thinner is more important than the thing not melting into a puddle of slag)
I think my biggest in terms of workload on the computer was this one:
Wow that’s awesome, what you did i mean. but the amount of polys are great to hear aswell. Ive been finding alot of high end laptops with 64gb and other high specs so its great to here there are options. Fans are important and ill make sure to keep that in mind.
Yeah i like the more statuesque type of works not necessarily going for skin pours and every single wrinkle and crease. Just the pose and character body from head to toe. I was hoping to possibly create action scenes
Its also nice to know you had good experiences with blender. Thank you for sharing it was very insightful.
About 50-90 million, but it’s very contextual. Certain meshes are more stable than others to sculpt on based on the density of geometry that’s being sculpted on and the amount of Multres levels. I have had scenes go beyond 100 million, but those were models with independent meshes and I was also using geometry nodes for instanced meshes, which improves performance.
Nowadays I move over to ZBrush to finalise my high polys for the simple reason that ZBrush uses way less RAM than Blender for similar/better performance. However, I still do a lot of work in Blender, especially now when I am learning how to build my own modifiers/tools with geometry nodes to speed up things more than ZBrush can accomplish. For instance, I was able to create a face pattern modifier that can create chain mail from a low poly mesh, which generated about 10-30 million extra polygons in one of my tests without losing viewport performance or the ability to keep editing the settings/base mesh.
From my own perspective, the biggest bottleneck for Blender sculpting is RAM and to a lesser extent CPU power. I have had models using up all my 64 GBs of RAM from time to time, so investing in more RAM is a way to bypass some of the Blender performance hiccups. I hope the move to Vulcan and the potential Multires rework will help with reducing the resources needed for dense geometry models in Blender, since it is not incredibly far off from achieving ZBrush levels of fidelity if you have access to hardware to compensate for it.
ZBrush from my own experiences does not scale that well with hardware like Blender does, but the performance is also a lot more consistent across hardware specifications. I am also a bit unimpressed by ZBrush’s ability to export meshes. OBJ especially. Blender’s OBJ exporter since its rewrite is so much better than the one in ZBrush, which freezes/crashes for me on a regular basis when trying to export objects with 20+ million polygons. Decimating also proved to be very unreliable for me in ZBrush on a 50-60 million poly sculpt. Meanwhile my own Blender add-on has been fully capable of decimating models larger than that. It’s therefore hard for me to say that either ZBrush or Blender is better for sculpting, since they excel in vastly different areas.
mofro: it’s a bit laggy if i go in and start pushing vertex’s around. in object mode it acts normally when moving the cam around. it certainly wasn’t done with any mind to efficiency; that was day #10 of learning blender.
as for the laptop, it’s an origin pc eon-17x (newerish model, the new model came out right after i bought, ofc) (clevo P775TM1-G is what it’s built off of, sager prolly has a version too), pretty close to maxed out, all ssd’s etc. it was not bought with blender in mind though, it’s normally tasked with heavy audio work and video in mind, as i use it for both my day jobs, and needed to be able to handle high ambient temps (sometimes i do shows outdoors when it’s 100f/38c out. it is .not. lightweight or small. but given the rog asus laptop it replaced, i am quite used to that size laptop.
if i didn’t have to take it with me everywhere, and was stable at home, i would have gone with the tower version, which would have saved quite a bit. especially not having to buy power supplies for each typical location, and one in the car when i’m not at any of those.
back when i was trying to break bryce3d with number of polys (note that bryce handled, and even counted, polys differently… you couldn’t model in it, you created stuff with booleaning their primitives), one trick that i used then and could work somewhat in blender, is have the various bits in seperate files, merging/appending them only when you’re ready for rendering the final scene. you could use low poly proxy objects for placement until you’re ready for everything for final render.
Usually, I just use Cycles microdisplacement for this kind of repetitive detail rather than add gigabytes to the size of my .blend file. It is non-destructive too.
I’d personally be interested if @Musashidan happens to chime in, on his thoughts about sculpting hard surface content as opposed too organic stuff because…well I like cars
20 million thats not bad but what exactly do you mean by “single mesh”?
Because i like to have characters made with separate meshes to make up the body parts like legs and arms and work on them individually first. So do you mean a single limb may reach 20mil for you?
Thanks mate. Yes, this was finally resurrected from that old CGsociety thread.
It’s interesting that you picked this car because I initially ported the original model, that was sub-d modeled in 3dsMax, into Blender to try and do some basic work on it before going to Zbrush.
It was pretty much impossible to work on it in Blender due to the terrible performance. It was lagging so much that I could only get a 1 or 2 fps, and trying to do anything between modes, with modifiers, or with sculpt mode was unusable. Long delays and endless lagging. And I have a pretty decent machine - i9 16 core/128 RAM/3090 with 24 Vram.
Hard surface is an interesting one because you can obviously keep things as low res cages and use sub-d, but if you’re adding sculpted detail(for print) then you have to go pretty high. You can use sculptis/dyntopo to add localised detail, but it will depend on how low your base is.
I ended up having to bring the whole lot into Zbrush to finish up and get print ready. As the original was a lot of single-sided geo and open borders I had to basically remodel everything. I can’t remember what the final count was in Zbrush. I had to chop it all up with booleans and crunch it down for print, but it was probably around 200 million in Zbrush before this. Remember though, the count you see in Zbrush is points, so you can double that in Blender triangles. @Frozen_Death_Knight
As for my highest to date. That would be my most recent project that I did in Substance Modeler. That ended up at 1.2 billion. Yes, billion.
This had to be crunched right down for unwrap/texturing in Substance Painter, so this was pretty interesting.
little wonder then, that one must have a decent enough system to even contemplate tackling a project budget scaled too that density, also thank you for your insights very useful indeed.
EDIT:
I’m kinda working on something similar atm but a humble dystopian automotive biased variant and hopefully doable in Blender (3.5x)
Yep, and that was in VR too. Substance Modeler can handle some insane high res, but you do need a decent machine, especially in VR. You can still get 50 million with a lower end machine though.
Best of luck with it. mate. It should be fine. I suppose there are just more things to be wary of, and workarounds in involved, to achieve higher counts in Blender.
Personally, when doing high detail stuff, I like the freedom to not have to keep worrying about performance and polycount while working. It tends to kill a bit of the creativity.
You know its an absolute pity that we don’t see the car in action.
I d’ like to see people getting run over with it, getting mashed into meaty chunks by the rotating blades on the wheels.
I want to hear the engine roaring like an insane beast while the minigun goes brrrrrrrrrttt, spitting out an angry stream of bullets that cut through everything like butter and shells that rain down in an 5m radius.
I was thinking about a single sculpted 20 million poly mesh of a character body. As Blender needs to refresh the complete 3D environment with every brush stroke, multiple objects will cause more slowdown. This is where ZBrush excels: its way of refreshing the viewport is smart. As far as I know, once you stop orbiting / panning / zooming, only the local area where you’re sculpting is refreshed, while the surrounding area is a 2D screenshot.
haven’t been close to that again since, but i’m sure i will. 
