Blender multires problem...

Greetings, Blenderistas! I've been obsessed with the challenges of sculpties & Blender in recent weeks, and was making some progress, when suddenly I started getting a strange behavior in Blender...

A little background/setup first: I'm in v2.48a on a Mac (powerpc), and using Domino's scripts from July of 2008. I'm working through the tutorials at the Sculpt Blend site http://robynhuffaker.com/sculptblend/tutorials/index.html, where one of the techniques they recommend is starting with an 8x8 sculpt created with 0 levels of multires in place, then adding levels as you work your shape up (rather than starting with the default 2 levels you get when working with Domino's scripts).

The problem is, this technique was working fine til last night, when suddenly adding multires to a mesh started distorting it oddly. Normally, adding multires to a sphere would just 'smooth out' the sphere as you add levels. Now, when I add multires, each level makes the sphere more egg-like (actually, it's more like a lemon: the poles of the sphere get pointy)!! Basically, adding multires results in a mild scaling of the sphere in the x & y directions.

I hadn't made any updates to the software or Domino's scripts, and I'm unaware of changing any settings in Blender. I tried reinstalling both Blender & Domino's scripts, but the problem persists.

Am I just crazy? did multires always behave like this and I just didn't notice before?

OH, and another weird thing: If I go ahead and follow Dom's default, and create a sculpt with multires in place, IT WORKS JUST AS IT SHOULD!! nice, smoothly-plotted sphere at all levels (???) Removing those levels (go down to level 1, then hit the 'delete higher' button), then adding them again manually gets me back to lemon-ville :/

WTF???

I've never been able to add my own multires levels from a basic (No multires) sculpty sphere, it's always created the lemon shape. I don't really know why this is, specifically, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the poles being open, rather than a 'true' sphere, which is a continuous surface.

Anyway, you can still do the same thing, and if you use a Cast modifier, spherical type, with a factor of 1, you'll end up with a properly spherical sculpty, with only one extra step thrown in.

Note that for this particular use of the Cast modifier, the pin level of the multires doesn't matter, I've tested it, and with pin levels of each 1, 2, and 3, the sculpt remains the same shape, with no noticeable gapping at the poles.

Fantastic, Keira, thank you so much!

It's reassuring to see that it's not just me, and that there's a workaround, too!!

Yay!

Very interestingly i always got the lemon shape when i apply multires manualy to a sphere. So i wonder how you ever got it to work for you...

Anyways i do not fully understand what benefit you have by applying multires manually. Why can't you just create a sculptie with 3 Multires levels, then go to level 1, work until you are satisfied, then switch to level 2, and eventually to level 3 ? The only reason i can imagine is, that Domino's scripts only use Catmul-Clark for the interpolation during subdivision. Simple-subdivide is not supported. Is it that what you need ?

lol actually, Gaia, it's not so much a question of "what I need," as "what was happening that I didn't know better than to expect..."

I didn't have any particular purpose in mind for this technique, I've just been devouring every tutorial I can find on the web (including yours, which got me started on the whole sculpty-adventure, so THANK YOU!! )

I was confused when this behavior popped up in Blender, but it's entirely possible that it was happening before and I just hadn't noticed it (tho it does seem like a big thing not to notice, huh?). In fact, both you and Keira above have now pretty-much confirmed this suspicion for me...

Thank you again for your helpful spirit, and the wealth of information you've shared for all us Blender n00bs out here

This is really just about the only reason you would have for wanting to manually add multires with Domino's sculpts, unless you actually wanted the lemon shape for some reason.


Depending on how noobish you are to Blender, you may want to check out my video tutorials, as well. Link to the Youtube channel in my signature.... not that many there, yet, and mostly for those newer to Blender (So far), but still might be useful to you!

As for why the sculpties from Add>Mesh don't have the lemon shape when you opt to include multires automatically, I just assume that when Domino created the scripts, they (He? She?) noticed this lemon shape, and decided that this wouldn't be great for spherical sculpties, and so applied a cast modifier (Or other method) to the base sculpt within the script.