Smooth “Clay” For Sculpting

Question

I've recently begun to learn sculpting and use YouTube video tutorials for the same. But almost all of these tuts tell me to use a cube and use Multiresolution Modifier to smooth it.

My end result looks like this

As you can see, it looks block-y. A solution to this is to keep subdividing till it's smooth. But I want to know if there's another way to get smooth material to sculpt. Here's an example of the kind of material I want

https://youtu.be/NI6pd4Ym9qI?t=4m20s

Also, I used two cylinders to make the horn-y part of the hair because there wasn't enough material in the hair to grab. How do I sculpt hair like it's shown in the video?

Answer 1

Use smooth shading: Thoose monkeys have the same amount of vertices, one is shaded "smooth" and one "flat".

About hair sculpting: yuo can use the Snake hook tool in combination with Dynamic topology: thoose horns are maden with a Suzanne SubSurfed level 2, then applied, then a single stroke with Dyntopo 6 pixels.

Answer 2

Use Dyntopo instead of Multires modifier, and decrease the detail size to enough to get a smooth result. Use booltool to join your meshes that need to be joined to work correctly.

Answer 3

Multires works best when you've 95% modeled something in edit mode and just want to add the final details - the benefit of doing it this way is that using normal maps, you can have a simple model that looks super complicated which is great for animation and games.

BUT...

If you're just sculpting for renders or 3d prints - Dyntopo is the option you're looking for.

The downside to it is that it destroys whatever topology you had there before. I start around 12 and work my way up to around 3. If things are getting a little slow, apply a decimate modifier set to 0.2 - most of the time you won't notice a lot of difference.