I see artists render their very detailed sculpts in marmoset, blender etc. but they haven’t retopo’d their model nor baked or anything like that.
But from what I know a highly detailed sculpt can have millions of polys. How do artists render their sculpts without their PC’s slowing down immensely/crashing etc? Is there a way to prepare very high polycount sculpts for render?
Hi @Luulaalaa_A ,
Marmoset is a real time renderer for lower poly models. That means the model geometry has been optimized to lower poly counts, and detail has been captured probably in the form of normal maps, similar to game engines.
Other traditional 3D programs generally use a combination of optimized low to medium density meshes, and capture the fine detail with displacement maps exported from ZBrush or otherwise.
While no other program can comfortably work with the kind of poly counts ZBrush can, some rendering engines like Keyshot can handle very substantial amounts of polygons. So It may be possible to just dump a 10-20 mil poly model with vertex paint and render it in a reasonable time. Likewise ZBrush is also capable of rendering its own high poly models.
However this is likely to be a CPU intensive process that locks up the machine for some time. CPU based rendering is not multi-task friendly. These render scenarios will always perform better if you put in the work to optimize the mesh and capture detail with maps rather than real geometry.
ZBrush can make it look easy at times, but files with tens of thousands of millions are now, and have always been, difficult for most software to work with comfortably on most hardware without heavily impacting performance.
