Sculpting - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 242

Sculpting and Performance
While Blender can handle a large number
of polygons during sculpting, there are
some settings you can toggle and steps you
can take to try to boost performance.

Fast Navigate , on the Options panel of
the tool shelf in Sculpt mode ( Figure
8.22 ), displays the lowest sculpting
resolution whenever you transform
the viewport. At high levels of Mul-
tires detail, this can dramatically speed
up viewport rotation.
VBOs , found in the System: OpenGL
section of the User Preferences, stands for Vertex Buffer Objects.
When enabled, it can drastically speed up all areas of 3D viewport
and mesh manipulation. Turn it on and see what happens. Using
VBOs can lead to some display and selection glitches, so it is disabled
by default. One such glitch that I experienced on one of my produc-
tion systems is the inability to select edge loops in Edge select mode
when mesh editing. If you turn on VBOs, don't forget that you've
done so. Things may start acting strangely in the 3D view, and if
they do, you'll know why.
Smooth Shading. You might be in the habit now of using Smooth
Shading on all of your models. This can hurt performance during
sculpting. Set your object back to Flat shading with the Object mode button on the tool shelf. At
very high polygon counts, you'll hardly notice the visual difference anyway.

Figure 8.21, cont'd

Figure 8.22 Fast Navigate.

Next Up …
In Chapter 9, we rig the character model for animation.