Hopefully someone can help me with this,

I started with a displacement map on a plane, and got a base texture. From there I masked out a few stones and pulled them out. As you can see there is intense stretching, so I figured dynamesh would be great for re-distributing the polys, but as you can see my result is less than desirable.

This is 4 million polys, and I have projection turned on to keep the shape (it looks even worse without projection on) but still it's going to hell when I dynamesh it. Any suggestions?

Before:

Stretched polys:

After dynamesh:

Settings:

I really don't think there is ever a need to take dynamesh to 1024, especially for something that is largely a plane. I don't even know if it is meant to work on a plane to be honest; the documentation mentions that it is for volumes and not surfaces, so if there are no sides/back to it, you might get unpredictable results.

I'd just go back to the lower-resolution plane, get a side orthographic view where you can see the depth of the bricks, and just slice them once or twice with the slice curve to add the geometry, and then smooth out the sides.

dynamesh wont work on a flat model correctly, it will try and make it a solid volume. if you would of made the plane a box instead it would have worked much better. i always hit the fill holes button before dynamesh just encase.

Originally Posted by cryrid

I really don't think there is ever a need to take dynamesh to 1024, especially for something that is largely a plane.

After having used Dynamesh at work on about a dozen different characters and objects that each had several pieces that used it, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with this.

That said, I agree with the rest of the post. Don't try to use Dynamesh with planes; it'll get all janky and do weird shit constantly. It's definitely meant for volumetric stuff, so if you're going to use it then your best bet would be individual bricks or something instead of a plane.

After having used Dynamesh at work on about a dozen different characters and objects that each had several pieces that used it, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with this.

Dynamesh is for creating basemeshes, not for standard sculpting and preserving details. Unless you're working at an absolutely tiny scale where dynamesh @ 1024 would be cranking out a pitiful low amount of polygons, then by default the result is going to be a mesh with many millions of polygons at the first subdivision level. There's not a lot of uses for that.

Thanks for the replies everyone! I didn't know about the 'slice curve' tool, I'll give that a go, and maybe try my same method on a cube face, and post the result.

Cheers!

is the 1024 dependent on the size of your mesh?

Yup. If the mesh is insanely tiny, 1024 isn't going to do much beyond 1-2k polygons. If the same mesh is super massive, a resolution of 64 could give you more than 3 million. When you're working on a normal scale (like the default projects/tools), you shouldn't have to come anywhere close to 1024.

Originally Posted by cryrid

Yup. If the mesh is insanely tiny, 1024 isn't going to do much beyond 1-2k polygons. If the same mesh is super massive, a resolution of 64 could give you more than 3 million. When you're working on a normal scale (like the default projects/tools), you shouldn't have to come anywhere close to 1024.

Ah, thanks for this explanation Cryrid, been scratching my head on part of dynamesh glove here.