Advanced Member Mihu83 Posted April 25 Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 (edited) Hi, I've been looking for a way to add detail to my models for some time now and I have to admit that I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out the right way. I'm testing the alpha brush approach and the results are average... no matter how I set up Auto-Subdivide option, the number of polygons would grow to astronomical proportions, e.g. from 2 million to 13-16 million with a few brush strokes. The results varry but often the quality isn't good, with strange geometry, artifacts. Also, some brushes seems to add polygons even with the Auto-Subdivide option turned off. Stencils also end up with poor quality...mostly. I tested the approach with painting using Smart materials, with the option of depth only, no color, etc. The results are also rather average... you know, without really high amount of polygons you won't see miracles, but even meshes over 10 million look no so good, with jagged edges, etc. I'll just point out that I'm testing all of this on one element of a larger sculpture, so the final model would probably have hundreds of millions of polygons, which would be crazy... I only work with high poly models, I don't do retopo and UV's, so I'm looking for a way to reduce the number of polygons while maintaining detail, and at the moment I'm out of ideas. Do you guys have any tips on how to approach detail sculpting that I could try? What would be the correct approach? Edited April 25 by Mihu83 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted April 25 Share Posted April 25 Show the base model and any references that you like to achieve. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Mihu83 Posted April 25 Author Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 1 hour ago, Carlosan said: Show the base model and any references that you like to achieve. Here is an example - keep in mind that's only one part of the whole model, which is already over 100 million polys... This wheel, especially inner part(with cuts) is around 13 million polys. In this particular part, I wan't some metal surface noise, imperfections, pitting, etc. Now, there are also wood parts in this model and man, I've tried adding some wooden surface with 4096 x 4096 alphas and it's not very pretty. I really think, that I might end up somewhere in 200 million polys if I want to add decent detail to the whole model Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted April 25 Share Posted April 25 Are you using voxel mode ? Try switching to surface mode Voxel is for rough sketching, surface is for fine details. And you don't need so high polycount to add fine surface details. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Mihu83 Posted April 25 Author Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 (edited) 16 minutes ago, Carlosan said: Are you using voxel mode ? Try switching to surface mode Voxel is for rough sketching, surface is for fine details. And you don't need so high polycount to add fine surface details. That's not a voxel mode... I know the voxel/surface mode workflow, I'm using 3DC for quite some time... Yeah, then tell me how to add fine details, because no matter what, I'm getting this type of s****y result. With lower poly count, triangulation, weird artifacts or holes are even more visible or the details are blury, so... I rarely ask for advice, usually I will figure out things on my own, but in this case, there's something weird going on. Edited April 25 by Mihu83 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Elemeno Posted April 25 Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 4 minutes ago, Mihu83 said: That's not a voxel mode... I know the voxel/surface mode workflow, I'm using 3DC for quite some time... Yeah, then tell me how to add fine details, because no matter what, I'm getting this type of s****y result. With lower poly count, triangulation, weird artifacts or holes are even more visible or the details are blury, so... I rarely ask for advice, usually I will figure out things on my own, but in this case, there's something weird going on. what are you using for noise? the noise tool or an alpha stamp? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Mihu83 Posted April 25 Author Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 1 minute ago, Elemeno said: what are you using for noise? the noise tool or an alpha stamp? I've tried brush alphas in different modes, stencils, even smart materials in depth only mode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Elemeno Posted April 25 Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 Desktop 2025-04-25 23-56-02.mp4 well... lol i never use 3dcoat for sculpting anymore and this just reminded me why Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Mihu83 Posted April 25 Author Advanced Member Share Posted April 25 7 minutes ago, Elemeno said: Desktop 2025-04-25 23-56-02.mp4 4.07 MB · 0 downloads well... lol i never use 3dcoat for sculpting anymore and this just reminded me why Nice... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlosan Posted April 26 Share Posted April 26 Elemeno, you are working on Voxel mode... Mihu, try creating the low model on Modeling room, send it to Sculpt surface as multiresolution base mesh, bake and export Or create Voxel mesh using Live Booleans 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Solution Mihu83 Posted April 27 Author Advanced Member Solution Share Posted April 27 (edited) On 4/26/2025 at 6:09 AM, Carlosan said: Elemeno, you are working on Voxel mode... Mihu, try creating the low model on Modeling room, send it to Sculpt surface as multiresolution base mesh, bake and export Or create Voxel mesh using Live Booleans Gonna try that, but I might have found a bit different way - probably won't work for every piece of sculpt, but I'll be fine with that. So, the way would be - Plain mesh(no details) > Auto retopo > Sloppy UV's> Baking> Painting(Depth Only)> Paint mesh to Sculpt mesh> Reprojection to lower res copy of the object. I might combine this with Zbrush Noise maker, but that won't be needed for most parts, I guess. Edited April 27 by Mihu83 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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