How important is topology in sculpting?

I know that topolgy is a major factor in 3D modeling. Big fuss about correct loops etc. - all important for animation and whatnot. This is why I get a bit hectic, when I turn on wireframe and see that my once beautiful wire has turned into a mess due to the recent uses of the trim brush (yes, project is an option, but it has it’s limits).
In that case I tend to doing a voxel remesh, which often produces nasty artifacts and cleaning those up (smoothing), kills the sharp edges I just got through trimming.
Decimation has the same “problem”. Even though it produces great results on the optical side, the underlying mesh leaves things open for discussion.

So how important is this for high resolution models? Do I even need to care about the wireframe, once I hid some 100K vertices? Does it affect painting or lighting?

The simple reason for asking this question is, that worrying about the wire distracts me way too much from actual sculpting. Kind of a fear of messing up, before actually messing up.

Personally if you’re doing a high, high detailed sculpt (millions of vertices) at that point the wireframe is largely moot, you can’t see the individual poly’s and it begins to gum up system resources. You can topologically gauge what you’re doing just fine at that point. Wireframe is good for when you’re starting off a sculpt, blocking in the pieces, manipulating specific vertices, slowly ramping up the detail from low to high, before eventually then switching it off when it’s no longer needed. Lighting and painting will be affected, simply, the more vertices/faces - the better the result, as each face will receive light, shadow & colour - so the more in a tighter group, the cleaner and crisper the effect (this doesn’t apply to HDRI/environment, it’ll look the same on 1 poly or 1M) If you use the ‘keep sharp edges’ option in the voxel remesher, you’ll retain your edges - which you can then go over with the Pinch tool (medium to high value - 300-1200 range - really depends) - but this will neaten up your edges even more afterward as a good after touch. Importantly, if you’re just doing a 3D illustration in nomad, the final topology doesn’t matter - only for RAM conservation - topology plays a vital role if you’re planning on exporting the model out into a proper pipeline (animation or game) - but thats what retopo tool’s are then for in desktop 3D suites. Hope this answer helps bud.

Yes it does. Thanks alot. Since I dot not plan on exporting anything at the moment, I think I will be fine. :slight_smile:

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