With these tips, you should able to drastically increase your polygon-count limitation while sculpting.
1. Get Blender 2.5 Alpha, also go for the 64bit version if you have 3GB or more of RAM. 2.5 is simply a lot faster and refined than Blender 2.49. The tools and interface is also much cleaner and more intuitive. Also, a lot of work has gone into optimizing the sculpting feature in Blender 2.5.
2. Start with a base mesh, then apply the multires modifier. Do not use a default cube and rely on the multires modifier to do *all* the sub-division. It’s always better to start with a base mesh with a few thousand polygons, and use multires with a sub-division level of 2-5.
3. Turn off “Double Sided” in the Object Data panel. This will significantly speed up the redraw.
4. Delete UV texture data and Vertex Color data *might* help speed things up, but I don’t really know for sure.
5. Turn on VBO in the Preference menu. This will further speed up drawing speed. (Thanks Gustav!) Okay apparently it doesn’t according to another commenter, since sculpt mode already uses VBO by default.
mike, can you suggest me what laptop-hardware to get for starting with blender. good luck 4u
Also turning on VBO increases the performance a lot (if you have a gfx card that support VBO)…
Thanks, gustav, I forgot about that feature.
As for what computer is best for Blender, I find that a laptop with a good graphics card helps a lot. But most laptop with decent graphics card is usually in the 1000 usd range. Another option is to get a nvidia ion based netbook (hp311, asus 1201, etc). Sure the Atom processo will be slow for rendering, but the interface performance will be amazing.
gustave, sculpt mode uses VBO by default, even if the option is disabled.
hi i want to make huge objects like i see in movies with multiple many poly meshes will 64 bit quad core lots of ram and a good graphics card solve my problames
Another tip that helped increase sculpting speed a lot, at least in my case, is using orthogonal view instead of perspective.
It may also be useful to reduce the number of undo levels, to gain more memory.