I recently finished a project that used the new sculpt vertex colors, and I would like to share some feedback regarding my whole process. Something to keep in mind is that Blender is the only modeling/sculpting software I’ve ever used, so I won’t be drawing comparisons to other software.
The initial sculpt was made in 2.91 using the voxel remesh workflow. Pretty much everything worked fine aside from the remesher getting much slower as I increase the resolution. To get to 20 million vertices it took up to 5 minutes to complete the operation. Remeshing at 0.003m crashes Blender if the main body was a single object. There were often random lag spikes when sculpting, but overall it worked fine. I would consider sculpt mode’s current performance more inconsistent than slow overall. That said, however, the extremely high polycount tanks Blender’s performance everywhere outside of sculpt mode, especially edit mode (to separate objects) and rendering. EEVEE crashes immediately while Cycles for both CPU and GPU runs out of memory on a 300x300 px test render. Thankfully the decimate modifier was able to reduce the vertex count down to 9 million where it renders fine on EEVEE (cycles still didn’t work), but it took up to 7 minutes to apply the modifier with a collapse ratio of 0.5 for each object.
From here I downloaded the 2.93 release on 2/8/2021 to use the sculpt vertex colors. Just like when I was sculpting normally, it went smoothly along with random lag spikes.
However, this experience was far smoother than anything I’ve done using texture paint. There was also a bug that caused random streaks of paint across the model, but I don’t know what’s causing it and was unable to reproduce the issue on a simple file.
There were other minor inconveniences such as the swap colors hotkey (x) inconsistent with texture paint mode (instead of swapping colors it switches to the sculpt draw tool). The color filter fill mode has no access to color palettes, and I expected it to behave similarly to texture paint’s fill tool which is a single click, but instead I have to click and drag multiple times in order to fill in the desired color. Hopefully the UI and brush management will be improved in the future. Lastly, and unrelated to sculpt vertex colors, but is there a way to remove all face sets? Joining objects automatically creates them, but I find them distracting and the only way I could figure out how to remove them is to cover all face sets with a new face set and randomize colors until I get white.
Face sets colors are an overlay that can be disabled under Viewport Overlays popover.
You need the object in Sculpt mode to see the options in the popover.
Really lovin’ the new Elastic mode in Blender 2.92’s Snake Hook. I haven’t had the time to sculpt for weeks. Another great improvement, thanks @pablodp606, also for making it Dyntopo-compatible!
A kind request: could the Relax Face Sets function please be moved from the Mesh Filter tool to the Edit Face Set tool? I keep going to the wrong tool because I expect any face set operator to be in Edit Face Set.
Ah, gotcha. Maybe it could be reflected somehow in the UI, even if it’s just visually dividing active tool settings from global and workspace settings.
If the active tool settings share the tab with global and workspace settings some sort of visual divide, more clear naming or at least a different tooltip.
To inject something positive as well, I had to do some topo shifting today and Blenders slide relax is miles away from anything maya or that other one starting with a “z” had to offer.
Definitely. Pablo is doing a great job supercharging Blender Sculpt Mode. My favorite recent additions are the Elastic mode of Snake Hook, the Cloth brush improvements, the expanding masking and face set tools, and the Pose brush also keeps getting better and better.
(And perhaps it should only be a single line with a color, since colors in Blender can have an alpha value? That would also make it consistent with how regular objects get handled in the Viewport Display tab.)
That elastic brush is great, another thing there’s no alternative for elsewhere. I usually use sculpt mode for smaller tweaks and fixes but I want to use it more in the future.
Meanwhile Pablo has uploaded a stream where he introduces the sculpt expand tools -
Would be cool to get snappy 2-5 minute videos from him explaining the tools ha made.
Two things that come to my mind after watching this:
1, @pablodp606 shows the new smooth shape mash, and mentions that most of the people use masks actually in a way that they want to paint inclusion mask (what they want to focus on, instead of exclusion mask). So most people adopted a habit of painting the mask and then immediately invert it. So he decided to invert the default behavior for the new smooth shape mask, so that it includes by default. This is confusing, because he changed the default for this one specific tool, but kept it the same for all the other sculpt masking tools (such as the regular, brush based mask tool). So now we will have this odd inconsistency where some masking tools include by default while others exclude by default. Shouldn’t this behavior be unified, consistent?
2, Here, at 10:20 time mark:
He shows that when you want to modify/add to the existing selection while starting a new smooth shape mask stroke, instead of overriding the existing selection, you can start the stroke, and then during the stroke, press E key to activate “preserve” mode, which adds to current selection instead of overriding it. He proceeds to show it repeated several times in rapid succession, and it becomes apparent of how clumsy, very “old blender” style of workflow it is, requiring users to perform this hotkey dance which does not feel natural in any other software than Blender.
I do not understand this. Masking is a means of element selection in the sculpt mode in the same manner Vertex/Edge/Face selection is in the mesh edit mode. And Blender already has standard for it. Regular click-drag overrides active selection, Shift+click-drag extends the current selection and Ctrl+click-drag subtracts from the given selection. So why do we have to have this odd preserve mode which needs to be toggled during the modal stroke, and why can’t it just follow the Blender standard of having preserve when starting the stroke while holding Shift key in the smooth shape mask tool, ih the same way you hold down Shift key when you want to preserve current selection and add to it in Mesh Edit mode?
It should be all the more easier now that Blender has tool system which allows custom keymap bindings per tool, so that that binding the Shift key to start smooth shape mask in the mask tool would not override shift key for for smoothing topology in all the surface deformation tools, just in the mask one…?
Everyone uses these differently I guess. Watching the video it was at least 50 minutes of showing the abstract or hard/impossible to control features for making patterns - something I would definitely never ever use. Maybe with shader/geo nodes from time to time, they’re non destructive after all.
That’s just me though. Personally I use that other sculpting software for over 15 years now on a daily basis, so a lot of this seems clumsy and unpractical to me - which might very well be because I’m accustomed to something else, working in a specific pipeline.
Yes, sure. I agree. The point I was trying to make was just that if all the tools follow same rules, then it’s easier for users to handle switching between the tools, as they don’t have to switch the muscle memory as well. So it’d be nice if once a person learns how selection hotkey work in edit mode, they can reuse the same muscle memory in sculpt mode.
