Best resolution and bit depth for sculpting with alpha textures in Blender

If you're trying to use Alpha brushes in Blender for sculpting, you may encounter this issue: It's blurry, or it seems you don't have enough resolution even though you've got a lot of subdivisions. In this video we look at a few possible causes.

Alpha brushes, which are sculpt brushes that use a height map to add detail, need a lot of geometry to work. But not having enough geometry may not be the only reason they don't look sharp.

It may simply be that you have a different object selected. Your Multires modifier has a viewport level setting that dictates how much resolution it should show when that object isn't selected.

This is meant to save resources and keep the viewport working fast. It's also important to set falloff to constant, so that the edges of the alpha are not lost. The bit depth and resolution of your alpha textures is also important. A good resolution seems to be 512 x 512 pixels.

As for the bit depth, 16 bit is fine, but at 8 bit you start to see artifacts. So, 512 x 512 and 16 bits is a great resolution and bit depth for alphas. Finally, make sure you set the object to Shade Smooth in Object Mode.