I'm sculpting a horse atm. I'm at 1,5 million verts and working on the facial details. I'm switching over to Dyntopo for those. Working on the eyes. I used the density brush to add more verts to that area. I was looking for the right detail size, and I realized I didn't understand how that detail size in px actually works. And how should I evaluate the right detail size for the stage of my sculpt. Is this in relation to the number of verts, the measurements of the model, or how close the viewport is to the model? And why is it in pixels? Or is px short for something else? Thanks in advance.
Hii Jonatan,
Have you not done the Fundamentals of Sculpting? https://cgcookie.com/courses/core-fundamentals-of-digital-sculpting-blender
Relative Detail is in (screen) pixels, so if you zoom in on your model, the details you sculpt get smaller; if you're zoomed out, your (sculpted) eye might cover 12 pixels, so a detail size of 12 px will result in Edges that are as large as that eye.
One thing that can be easy to do, especially with Dynamic topology, is to get too focused on details too early.. making something look really great when you're zoomed in, only to realize when you pull back that it doesn't fit with the rest of what you have. Work in stages. Try to get all the large forms in first before going in for detail. Once you have those in place, work on your secondary level of details, getting all those in place. Then refine further and further as needed.
Exactly when those "stages" are will be up to you and depend on the project, but you'll have much better results working like this.
One year, I did a 30-day challenge where I spent about 30 minutes sculpting something. The idea was 2 fold... one to get me doing something (because it's easy to find half an hour to try to do something) and the other is that the quick amount of time forced me to work on larger forms first. 3 of my favorite sculpts that I've done have come from that... a dragon, a turtle, and an elephant. I'll use them a lot as models for textures and such when I want to play around with procedural textures and often use them for lighting exercises as well, or as figurines for rooms I'm doing..
I took a look at the sculping in 4.5 (since I hadn't in a bit... Relative is like Martin said. It changes based on how zoomed in you are on your object. So when you sculpt a bit, then zoom in, then sculpt some more, it looks like it's the same size relative to how you are zoomed in, but when you zoom out.. the area where you were zoomed in will have tighter, more densely packed geometry. Constant stays the same size regardless of how zoomed in you are until you change the resolution setting. When you're using it, it might look bigger on the area where you are working if you're zoomed in and smaller when you're zoomed out, but relative to the other geometry, it actually stays the same when you pull back. I haven't tried out Brush or Manual detail yet, so I don't know how they compare.
Thank you all very much for your help and tips. I have rewatched the dyntopo part of Kent's Core course. It was about 6 months since my last sculpt, and it might be good practice for me to rewatch the 2nd chapter of Kent's Core course when there are such big gaps between sculpts. Because I definitely feel that I need to relearn some things after longer intervals. Being occupied with other aspects of 3D, modeling, texturing etc. And Omar I think that is where my initial question came from, that I felt I didn't get enough detail, where I expected the settings to be okay. And now onwards to retopology...