Rebuild & Repaint
Rebuild remakes the model you are sculpting at a detail level you choose, using the method you choose — stretched and crowded polygons become even again. Repaint turns a textured model’s albedo into vertex colour so that colour survives a rebuild. Both live in the Rebuild Method accordion at the top of the Sculpt palette, because rebuilding is the first step of the loop: sculpt until the polygons are stretched or parts have grown into each other, rebuild, carry on.
Rebuild
Rebuild rebuilds the whole model as one even, closed mesh. Separate objects stay separate. Vertex colours carry over, and so do the mask and the material names. UV maps and textures do not — with Field remesh the new mesh has no UVs, so use Repaint first if the colour comes from a texture.
Rebuild method
The method decides how Rebuild gets to the new mesh, and the two approaches are good at opposite things. It also changes what the detail level means: for Field remesh a level sets the cell size; for the Subdivide methods it is a number of splitting passes.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Field remesh | Throws away the model’s topology and lays down its own, even over the whole surface. Use it to consolidate something dense, messy or scanned. It measures the surface onto a grid, so it cannot hold a plate thinner than about two cells — thin pieces such as an axe blade or a cape come back that much thicker. |
| Subdivide (smooth) | Keeps the topology and splits it, rounding the model’s facets off (Catmull-Clark). Nothing is resampled, so the shape does not drift, nothing inflates, and the UV map survives. It cannot fix bad topology or fuse overlapping parts. |
| Subdivide (linear) | Keeps the topology and splits it, leaving the silhouette exactly as it was and only adding polygons. Like the smooth version, the UV map survives and overlapping parts are not fused. |
| Keep objects separate | On by default, and only available with Field remesh. On: every separate piece of the model — a body and its hair strands, say — is remeshed on its own, so pieces that touch or pass through each other stay separate objects. Off: everything that touches is fused into one closed shell. The Subdivide methods never merge objects; each piece is split where it is. |
Rebuild from: the modified or the original mesh
Once the model has changed since you loaded it, the Rebuild Method section says so in orange, and a Rebuild from dropdown appears under the method. Subdividing it, sculpting it or rebuilding it all count. The dropdown only matters for Field remesh; the Subdivide methods always split the mesh as it was loaded.
| Choice | What Field remesh rebuilds |
|---|---|
| Modified mesh (the default) | The model as it is now, as you see it — subdivided, sculpted. The detail level counts from its polygons, so level 1 keeps its current count. |
| Original Mesh | The model as it was loaded. Anything done to it since is not carried over, and the level counts from the loaded polygon count. |
For example, load a 166,000-polygon model and subdivide it three times (about 2.9 million polygons). Field remesh at level 1 then rebuilds about 2.9 million polygons from the Modified mesh, or about 166,000 from the Original Mesh. Meshes you added to the sculpt are kept either way. If the loaded mesh itself was edited before its original could be kept, Original Mesh says so; open the file again to rebuild from it.
Rebuild detail
Rebuild detail sets how dense the rebuilt mesh is, relative to the model being rebuilt. Level 1 keeps the polygon count it already has; every level above that doubles it and every level below halves it — 2 is twice the polygons, 0.5 about 70%, 0 half. Fractions are fine.
The Subdivide methods make whole passes of four polygons for one, so there a level rounds to the nearest pass, and nothing below 1 removes one.
A grey line under the slider shows what the level asks for:
- With Field remesh, the polygon count and roughly what that mesh costs in memory (… M polygons, about …), prefixed with 1:1 at level 1.
- With the Subdivide methods, the number of passes (N subdivision pass(es), four polygons for one each time), or 1:1 — copied across, no subdivision at level 1. No polygon count is shown here because a triangle mesh is paired into quads before it is split, so the true count is only known once the rebuild runs; it appears in the status line when it does.
Memory check
Below the detail line, a memory line reads Peak ~… while building, … free, and adds the highest level that fits (“up to level … fits”) or says that no level fits now. The peak is what building this level takes at once — the new mesh and every cache made for it, about four times what the finished mesh keeps. “Free” is the smaller of the RAM that is free and what Windows can still commit, because running out of either stops a build.
The line is grey while comfortable, amber when the build would take most of what is free, and red when it will not fit.
More memory than is free
If the peak will not fit in the memory free right now, Rebuild asks before it starts. The prompt states the peak, the free RAM and how much more Windows can commit. If Windows can make up the difference from its page file on disk, the rebuild can still run, but it can take many times longer and the machine will be slow until it is done. If even the page file is not enough, the rebuild would fail part-way; a larger page file (System > Advanced > Performance > Virtual memory) would let it run, slowly.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Use level … | Rebuilds at the highest level that fits in the memory free now. Only offered when such a level exists; otherwise the prompt suggests closing other programs to free some. |
| Rebuild anyway (slower) | Rebuilds at the chosen level, letting Windows use its page file. Only offered when the page file can cover the shortage. |
| Cancel | Closes the prompt without rebuilding. |
Sculpt detail budget
With Field remesh, the Sculpt detail budget in Memory Settings has its own ceiling: past it, the level you asked for is not honoured. When the chosen level is above that ceiling, an amber warning says the budget stops the rebuild at about level ….
- If this machine has the memory for more, a Raise the budget to … M samples button appears. It sets Settings > Memory Settings > Sculpt detail to what this level needs and saves it; the memory it takes is already counted in the peak shown above.
- Otherwise the warning tells you to raise it in Settings > Memory Settings yourself.
Repaint
Repaint samples the albedo through the mesh’s own UVs and stores it as vertex colour. Do this before a Rebuild: the rebuild carries vertex colours across but cannot carry a UV map, so this is how a textured model keeps its colour through one.
Repaint needs a UV map and an albedo image on the loaded mesh. A model that has already been rebuilt has neither, so repaint it before the rebuild, not after. Without them the button is greyed out.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Rebuild | Rebuilds the model with the chosen method and detail level. |
| + | Runs both in order: rebuild, then repaint the result from the albedo as soon as it lands. Needs the same UV map and albedo image as Repaint. |
| Repaint | Samples the albedo through the mesh’s UVs into vertex colour. |
Related pages
- Subdivision Levels — subdivision levels live on the Generated Mesh: rebuild the model, then switch the viewport to the Generated Mesh to add levels to it.
- Dynamic Topology
- Memory Settings — where the Sculpt detail budget is set.