I just finished my first sculpt in blender and I think I managed it using a low poly mesh to start and then everything sculpted using dynamic topology enabled. My question is with Blender 2.73a is there a need to apply the multi resolution modifier to the mesh before I start sculpting? What is the benefit of doing that?
Thanks
You can sculpt a simple mesh (a cube) without anything else.
You can sculpt any mesh and use dyntopo. You'll get a full triangulated mesh with as much topo as you want/can, exactly where you need it.
You can sculpt on a quad based mesh with multires. You'll get a new level of details with each subdiv. The whole mesh is subdivided.
But using a multires on dyntopo is exactly what you shouldn't do. Multires (or subdivision) is not supposed to work well with triangles.
Both have pros and cons, they are a different way to do sculpting.
a Cube with quad and a cube with triangulated faces, with a subdivision (same as multires):
No, the entire point of the Multi-rez mod is to be able to change it as you sculpt. Rather than doing low-poly sculpts (which I'm sure you know by now is really tedious and kinda frustrating) add a multi-rez to the object and sculpt as much as you can effectively, then increase the subdivisions on the multi-rez. Repeat this until your sculpt is finished.
Try not to increase subdivisions unless you reach that point where the brush has no visual effect anymore and save before increasing since it's difficult for the computer. Remember that applying the modifier takes away the options that are really helpful for sculpting.
