Why do my sculpts appear lumpy?

Question

I'm working on a character sculpt in Blender. One problem I've noticed throughout all of my sculpts is the slightly lumpy quality to them. I'm not entirely sure how to describe this, but nothing I sculpt is ever entirely smooth.

Notice how these legs aren't completely smooth, almost as if they have cellulite.

I try to combat this by using Dyntopo and the Simplify tool to preserve detail only where I need it most. Things like hands, feet, and creases can retain a higher polycount, while the rest of the body can remain relatively low-poly.

(Please ignore the obscenely detailed feet, they're a recycled asset I booleaned on)

Unfortunately, the surfaces still look bumpy, even with a lowered polycount.

A few of the tutorials I've seen have incredibly smooth character sculpts, such as this one. How do I achieve this level of smoothness in my own sculpts?

You can find my .blend file here! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Smooth surfaces are achieved by even quads and iterations: you add details, then smooth them out, then add them again, starting from big forms and ending with tiny details only at the end of the process.

In my example I turned off dyntopo, went to front ortographic view, pressed Shift R and set a value about 0.006, then pressed Ctrl R, to remesh the character.

Then I used a big brush with low strenght (about 0.3) to smooth the surfaces.

In a couple of minutes I obtained a smooth base mesh: some details are lost but they can be readded with ease.

So, more iterations between adding details, remesh and smoothing is the answer (or, better, one possible answer).