To make... a box.

There is a certain set of video tutorials that explain multires by having the viewers create a box. Although a box might be a silly example, it serves the purpose, and it introduces some useful editing techniques.

So I'm going to use the box example, but with a few variations that I think make it easier. So go back into blender. Delete your old sculpt, and if you'd like, save the file as something new. Now create a new sculpt mesh. Make it a cylinder with multires subdivision, just like the previous one. In the Edit Buttons, click "Set Solid" (marked in green) to give the mesh sharp edges instead of smooth ones.

Now switch to the top view (NUM7), go into edit mode (TAB), then deselect everything (A). Then with the Box Select tool (B) select the bottom part of the circle, like the first image below. Then, making sure proportional falloff is OFF, press S to scale, Y to scale along the Y axis, then press 0, then ENTER. You should end up with a straight line of vertices, like the second image below.

Now select some vertices on one side and press S, X, 0 to make on of the sides of our box. Keep doing this until you have a square or rectangle that looks something like this:

Now lets also cap off the top and bottom. To do this, go to the front view (NUM1) and select the top and bottom edge loops. Then press S, SHIFT-Z, 0. This scales everything except the Z axis down to a point.

Then make sure the top a bottom are flat. Use the Box Select tool to select the top point you just made and the next edge loop and scale Z to 0. (S, Z, 0) Do the same for the bottom.

Note: To anyone with OCD, I apologize for my terrible box. As you can see, it isn't very even. I did this on purpose, though.. Lets bake this sculpt and upload it to the grid.

Tada! Up close, this cube looks pretty good, right? But as we zoom further away, the corners start doing weird things. You've probably seen similar behavior in a lot of sculpties in Second Life.

So what do we do about it?

A Better Box

Go back to blender and in Edit Mode, find the tab labeled "Multires". If you look for the 'level' button, (marked in green) You'll see that currently, you are on multires level 3.

What does this mean? Well... click on the left side of this button to switch to level 2, then level 1. You'll see your cube lose a lot of its vertices, and as you can see from the picture above, my cube no longer looks like a cube. It looks exactly how it looked in world when I zoomed out.

So what would happen if I made it look like a cube at Multires level 1? Lets do that.

I even decided to line up the middle vertices, just to make it look pretty. Anyway. Lets switch back to level 2.

Woah. Hey what happened here?

Blender multires likes to help... 'correct' your mesh if one multires level is very different from another. Level 1 may have been that perfect box, but level 3 was still the old box, so Blender tried to create a 'happy medium.' In a lot of cases this behavior is what you want, but sometimes, especially with geometric shapes, you don't want this at all.

So... lets fix this. Hit CTRL-Z to undo, going back to our nice level1 box.

Now since Blender still thinks multires level 3 and 2 should be our old box, the easiest thing we can do to change that is delete the higher levels. In the multires tab, find the button called "Del Higher" (marked in green) and click it to get rid of the higher levels. All of the options below should vanish. Next, click on the drop box currently marked "Catmull-Clark" and switch it to "Simple Subdiv."

So with Simple Subdiv selected, click "Add Level" twice, and you should get something that looks like this from the top:

Now if you bake the sculptie and upload it again, you'll get a cube that holds up well, even at a distance.

The moral of the story, and some tips

This box held up better when build at a lower multires level, and the same is true of other sculpties.

If a sculpt is simple enough, like most organic shapes, I'll start sculpting it at multires level 1. For more complex sculpties, like furniture, I'll start with multires level 2. I never, ever, ever start with multires level 3. Sure, you can make really complex sculpties at that level, but if your object turns into a birds nest when you walk three feet away, it's not really worth it.