I know blender is limited with sculpting and polygons. But i was wondering if there would be an update sooner rather than later that could make sculpting high res/ fine details and more complex models possible within blender?
Also when reaching those types of higher polys the performance would still be smooth with little to no lag.
Its not to say that blender now is bad, but nomad sculpt on an ipad pro is capable of reaching 30mil polys and has good performance when getting in the millions. And obviously there’s zbrush which is the biggest sculpting software out there.
It would be great too have that possibility for blender as well, with blenders other tools at your disposal.
On a sidenote a leak has apparently came out about microsoft newest surface studio laptop. apparently its a 13thgen i7 64gbram and geforce rtx 4060. It’s exactly what ive been looking for and would love to use blender on a device like that but if sculpting were to be more limited compared to other softwares for making bigger projects. Then i might have to stick with nomad sculpt for the time being.
The current priority is finishing up and committing the new Dyntopo core (which will make that area of sculpt capable of preserving data for starters). blender/blender - blender - Blender Projects
This part of sculpt will also receive a huge performance increase as another consequence. Multires is still on the radar, but Blender only has one main dev. on sculpt mode right now and it is very complex stuff.
It’s already happened - updates within the last year or two have already improved performance. We’ll probably see additional improvements as improving high poly performance does seem to be a general goal that gets revisited somewhat frequently.
It’s worth pointing out that Zbrush gets away with their outrageous unbeatable polycounts by employing a variety of hacks that likely aren’t possible in Blender. Supposedly that’s why they have no smooth shading and lack real perspective, if I’m remembering correctly. Zbrush is streamlined to do one thing well, whereas Blender has a lot more “baggage” as there’s a wider range of features that need to be kept functional while trying to improve high poly performance and have the potential to conflict. I don’t believe we’ve hit the wall in regards to potential improvement though.
Also, we need sculpt layers. I can’t give up zbrush without sculpt layers. Blender Studio wishes they had sculpt layers.
One thing you should know is that Blender’s sculpting has a performance hit if you use a multires modifier. That performance hit becomes increasingly worse for each level of multires that is added.
However, if you apply the multires modifier and instead sculpt on pure, modifier-less geometry, you will have a much better performance. When doing this, I can actually get up to 30 million triangles and still have the sculpting mode work at a useful level of performance, and I don’t have the strongest of computers. Of course, useable doesn’t mean that it’s not pushing the limits of Blender and endangering your project’s stability, so I would usually work at a lower level still.
Then, once I’m finished detailing a model, I found that I can add a multires modifier at the very end of the process, reconstruct the lower levels (provided that the model still has its clean subdivided topology) and use multires only for baking purposes.
Interesting that the 2D mode in ZBrush is a painting application with a depth buffer and some sort of pseudo-lighting-shadow renderer. This technique is easy to understand, however I haven’t figured out how the transition to the 3D sculpt happens.
The most reasonable technique is to have some sort of 2D bump map painting on top of the faces. So you get the large parts sculpted in 3D and the fine details painted as depth textures.
If Blender is going to support hybrid sculpt+paint at the same time we are ready to go. The only thing that is missing is a Parallax Occlusion Shader (optimized and out of the box – not a custom made in shader editor).