cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Start big or small? Can´t wrap my head arounf it...

Knogen
Explorer
Hello. I´ve made a couple of sculpts and when I want do give it more details I run into problems...
For example, I built a house and then a door. Then i zoom in to do a door knob and it gets really low-poly...
Is this perhaps because I started the sculpt really small?
How do you start? It´s really hard to explain, because I don´t know if it makes any difference how you start.


8 REPLIES 8

jayhawk
Superstar
I wondered this same thing at first. I know what you mean. I would just utilize layers and play with increasing resolution depending on the detail you want for each layer.

nalex66
MVP
MVP
Get all your larger-scale shapes in place, then increase the resolution when you can't create the details you want at that scale.

You can also make use of layers, and create the door or doorknob on a new layer with a higher resolution instead of increasing the resolution of the whole house.

DK2, CV1, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3.


Try my game: Cyclops Island Demo

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
When I add layers, I often take a guess at how much res I need on the new layer, compared with what I have in place already and shrink the bounding box down as far as I need to go (both grip buttons + move your hands in and out). This saves having to tap the res up a couple of times every time you add a layer. Plus you get finer control cos your steps aren't exponents. 

Res really messed with my head at the beginning. Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome, learning-wise. Stick with it, it'll start making sense soon enough.

Knogen
Explorer
I actually didn't know how the resolution worked and that it only affected one layer.  
But I've noticed that the bigger the stamps are, the more detailed they are. 
So if I place a stamp in it's biggest size and then shrink the build place I don't lose res. 
But if I start with a smaller build space and make the stamp even smaller there isn't much detail to speak of. That makes me want to shrink the build space to be able to build small and detailed. But then things got to small and lost details. But you're saying that if I sculpt those small things in a separate layer and then ups the res, it can still look good?

Knogen
Explorer
And by the way, I've learned to use layers to some extent. Much easier to paint and sculpt...

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
I think of a stamp as a bunch of cubes, like they're made of really tiny minecraft blocks. If you scale the stamp, it's like subdividing it but growing at the same time because each block stays the same size.

The stamp is actually filling an invisible 3-d grid, the limits of which are defined by the black bounding box. If you stretch this, it changes the size of the blocks. If you up-res it, it subdivides any existing geometry but shrinks the bounding box (and the individual block size) so the sculpt stays the same size but made of twice as many blocks. 

If you think of it in 2-d like the way pixels work on a flat screen, it might start to make sense. 

DeadlyJoe
Rising Star
For characters (bodies, heads, etc.) I like to start with the default resolution. Enable Mirror mode, which will display the mirror plane (a square with two bisecting dashed lines). Using the sphere clay tool, scale the sphere's diameter up to about 2/3 the of the width the mirror plane. For me, this is the perfect scale to start creating rough features.

ozelon
Protege
It's funny as this would have been an easy answer before VR (i.e. Zbrush). IT would have been always start small, in low resolution from my experience.
However with medium especially after the latest patch (smooth tool working on high rez sculpts) that may not apply anymore.
I actually had to put more time into my last sculpt because of having to sharpen some edges because of starting with smaller rez.

Maybe it's more a matter of RAM now? I'll try to start bigger with my next one and test the difference.