system requirements

#1

Hi all,
I am new to blender and am starting to enjoy working with sculpture,
I have just found out that my huge laptop is still seem not powerfull enough. I still want to keep it, I have 3G ram on it and a 2.0 ghz processor. I have used it for a simple skull tuorial and cant go higher on a multires than 6. Is this normal? I am wondering how to sculp a whole character with this then. I still want to use my laptop but are there any external or internal things that I can use to make my laptop more powerful? Any advise would be appreciated! :slight_smile:

#2

Depends entirely on your base mesh,
you could add more loops to the areas of your mesh that need more detail,
whilst keeping the base simpler where you can get away with saving poly’s.

Also, theres a big difference between sculpting(multires) in 2.4x and 2.5x… :slight_smile:

also as for recommended system specs feel free to check this page out:
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/requirements/

#3

Thanks for the quick response,

I am using 2.5 I hope what you meant was that it is better. I find alot of improvment in menus and shortcuts. I followed exact step from the following link:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/blender/sculpt-model-and-texture-a-low-poly-skull-in-blender/
So I started with the base cube. Are you saying that if I make a more complicated mesh and leave minimal work for sculpting that might imrpove? Bythe way as soon as I try to create the uv map it crashes.
My sculpt is already as simple as the mutires 6 can be detailed. and I had much bigger hopes for sculpting. :sad:

#4

Ah yes, in blender 2.5, each base poly will become a ‘sub-division patch’ of sorts,
and they are kept in memory as separate chunks so to speak,
so they can be cached to disc separately as needed.

what that means is, that if you have a cube as a base mesh,
it has only 6 quad poly’s, now each of those get subdivided as a separate patch.

lets say 1mil of poly’s takes up ~100mb of ram, you have 2gb of ram,
your OS and everything running in the bg takes up about 1/4 to 1/2 of it,
your left with 1gb+ of free memory, you start subdividing your cube…

the cube has six base quad’s so 6 patches, you subdivide the mesh until it’s 6mil poly’s,
that is 6 1mil patches, so it takes up 600 mb of ram, you subdivide one more time now
your going to quadruple the amount of poly’s you have 6*4 = 24,
so you’ll end up with 24 mil poly’s, and thus 2,4 gb memory is used,
and you end up caching to disk, that is sl~o~w to work with.

now lets say you subdivide the base cube, lets say 4 times,
each quadruples the amount of base poly’s…

64 = 24
244 = 96
964 = 384
3844 = 1536

so you end up with 1536 base quad poly’s,
that means the multirez modifier will have 1536 subdivision patches!

that makes things a lot easier, cause each patch can be cached to disk separately
when you don’t need them, so lets do the (annoying) math again with these figures now…

the cube has 1536 patches you subdivide trough the multirez now,
at level 6 it’s going to have 6291456 poly’s lets divide that between
the base patches to see how many poly’s each patch has >
6291456 / 1536 = 4096 much more manageable.

remember that 4096 poly patches are easier to store in memory,
and any we can’t see on the screen at any one time we don’t have to keep in ram.

what if we subdivide our cube again by one more level?
we get 25165824 poly’s overall but each of our patches is still just 16384 polys!

so we only cache to disk only what we need to,
and can keep all the patches in memory we need,
meaning we can sculpt details with out too much if any lag
that comes from disc caching the whole mesh.

I know, a long post, but hopefully it explains clearishly enough
how the new multirez works and how to ‘optimize’ your meshes for it.

if this wall of text is too much just check this video(less detailed explanation!):
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/01/26/tip-high-poly-sculpting/

#5

Wow, my head in steaming but I think I got it, so bottomline is i do as much as I can with meshes and them use multires. I will try it again, and will see if can get through it without crashing the blender. Thanks alot for the response.

#6

just DON’T press tab to edit or lock in the multires, or you may have millions of faces…and crash. Once you sculpt in multires, stay in multres. Then you have your high-poly sculpture for normal map baking to a lower-poly retopo mesh. (See Tony Mullen’s book Mastering Blender for step-by-step instructions).

#7

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