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I need advices to start scluilpt high resolution portraits.

Dan1018
Adventurer
Which settings should I choose and which workflow is it the best if I wish to sculpt high reolution portraits please?
Any suggestions/link to tutorials would be really greateful.
for example is it possible to set a default resolution before start to scuilpt?

thx.
23 REPLIES 23

Dan1018
Adventurer

DeadlyJoe said:


dan108 said:

considering that the downresing is destructive isn't it too hard to scuilp using medium?

It's difficult to sculpt very fine details, primarily because Medium doesn't have an alpha brush tool like ZBrush or Blender. We're hoping that alpha brushes are coming in a future update.

What Medium is extremely good at is blocking out models very quickly. I can sketch an entire character, head to toe, in Medium in 30 to 40 minutes, which would take me hours to do in Blender.  So, a lot of people are using Medium to sculpt the base model, and then exporting the mesh to ZBrush or Blender to add the details, textures, and render the final product.

Here is a dragon head that I did this morning which took 11 minutes.  The professionals, like Glen Southern of SouthernGFX, who work on this kind of art every single day, can do sketches like this even faster.




thx for the reply, I hope they will add this alpha brush that you say. can you provide a list of tools and features that they need to add in medium to do fine details scuilpt please? maybe this may help the developers to do a list of what they may introduce in the future patches.

Dan1018
Adventurer
@DeadlyJoe may I ask you how does it work an alpha brush tool please?

DeadlyJoe
Rising Star
There's a Suggestions thread at the top of this forum that has most of those requests. Also, Matt Hickman and other Medium development team members actively watch these forums and look for suggestions. So they're already pretty in-tune with what the community ultimately wants from the software. 

DeadlyJoe
Rising Star

dan108 said:

@DeadlyJoe may I ask you how does it work an alpha brush tool please?


Basically, alpha brushing uses gray-scale height maps and masks to add texture to a mesh very easily. It lets you paint fine details in very broad strokes. Here's how it's done in Blender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHnKWShOVLw

Anonymous
Not applicable
Couple of thoughts on this as well.  Depending on what you want to do with the final sculpt, you can squeeze more detail out by not merging layers.  For example, areas which benefit from very high resolution, such as eyes, can be rezzed up higher than a low detail area such as the neck.  Similarly, you'll get better mileage if your doing a face sculpt than a whole body sculpt, simply because you're working on a smaller volume to begin with.  Of course if you want things like highly detailed hair (which tends to cover a large area and use lots of details), you're going to hit limits faster.  Take cues from traditional sculptors who work in clay, which has physical detail limits, and see how these problems are handled efficiently.  A good paint job can also go a long ways towards increasing the perception of details that might be otherwise done with form.

Your system can do a decent job, but you're going to hit ram performance barriers at some point.  Your video card will perform faster and better when upgraded, but will do the job.  I started with a below spec video card (960) but had a lot of ram.  If you don't have one, the best cheapest upgrade is to get a vetted USB3 card, for around 25 bucks, it's surprising how much of a difference that can make, especially in later stages of the sculpt.

Of course, "high resolution", portrait means different things.  If you are shooting for hyper-real stuff, or work on the detail level that P3nT4gR4m is doing, you're going to have to work with other programs as well.   Until Medium gets some texture mapping tools (alphas/bumpmaps/fractals, etc) or tools with similar effect there will be limitations on the degree of highly focused details. 

Anyhow, you definitely have a useful tool here, and learning to push it to the limit can teach you quite a bit that you might not figure out otherwise, things which will still be useful when overall available processing power increases. 

Dan1018
Adventurer
may you show me some female/male portraits of human beings faces made only with Medium please?

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
If you checkout my sketchbook thread, look for any pics with the Medium logo (most of them) those are all Medium-only. 
https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/47445/p3nts-sketchbook

Dan1018
Adventurer

P3nT4gR4m said:

If you checkout my sketchbook thread, look for any pics with the Medium logo (most of them) those are all Medium-only. 
https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/47445/p3nts-sketchbook


very cool thx for the link! how do you do textures of the skin, hair, and iris please?

Anonymous
Not applicable

dan108 said:

may you show me some female/male portraits of human beings faces made only with Medium please?


Male and Female, Medium only.  Could go further with more ram, more patience, and/or better skills.  Also a few more tricks and more judicious use of the uprez capabilities would have made gains, haven't done a face sculpt only, in a while.  Unless they've automated that in the updates, you can gain volume by doing things like hollowing out interiors (not done with these sculpts). 

For comparison, face with figure.  Character is medium only.  Definitely some room to work on the face details, caught up in another project at the moment, though.



Dan1018
Adventurer
thx for reply, I didn't understand if 32GB of ram is enough for my purpose. can you tell me if 32GB are of for high resolution portraits please?