So in this video I'll go over the fundamentals of blender sculpt mode.
I'll try to keep this video as short as possible
and only talk about the essential sculpt mode related features.
A lot more can be found and looked up further on the blender manual.
If you might have any questions on how a setting in the interface works,
you can always right,
click on anything in the interface and click on online manual
or hover over it with the mouse and press F one.
This will take you directly to the official
documentation of any particular feature in the interface.
These fundamentals I will be talking about might not seem like much
but don't mistake that for lacking depth for the sculpting workflow.
Most of the features modes and editors are kind of
feeding into the possibilities of blender as a sculpting tool.
There will also be features that I will be intentionally leaving out
to not make this video too bloated or complex.
Also, before we start,
I can highly recommend you to get a pen tablet to really get the most out of sculpting,
drawing and painting and blender.
There are many settings that relate to pressure sensitivity
and sculpting with the pen is generally faster,
easier, more comfortable and economic for your hands.
It doesn't need to be a very expensive pen display.
There are many affordable options for tablets on the market
so if you're not familiar at all with sculpting in digital
software then look at it more like traditional sculpting with clay
instead of modifying the geometry of your object.
In edit mode, you are dynamically adding,
removing and moving around the shapes of your object to
affect your surfaces and volumes more freely and dynamically.
To enter sculpt mode and blender.
You can switch the mode in the top left corner of the three
D view port or use the pie menu with a shortcut control tap.
This will change the options in the interface
and replace your cursor with a brush circle.
The way you interact with your object and sculpt mode is
generally to left click onto the surface of your object.
By default you're using the draw brush and emergencies
within the brush radius are then pushed outwards.
Holding control while doing this will result in the opposite
effect in this case pushing the affected vortices inwards.
When holding shift
it will smooth the affected for disease.
Press F. To change the scale of your brush and left click to apply the change
also press shift F. To change the strength of your brush.
All these settings can be seen and changed in the tool settings in
the top bar and the sidebar of your three D view port.
If you cannot see these areas of the interface.
The way to toggle them is by using the shortcut T for the toolbar
and for the sidebar and looking into the tab called tool
and right mouse button clicking on the header
and enabling tool settings to get the top bar.
It's not called top bar anymore.
It was at some point during the development of Planet 2.8.
So the name kind of stuck with me and it's going to stay there for a while.
You can also toggle these areas while clicking on view and tackling them. There
there might also be a bit of confusion with the difference between tools
and brushes. So to explain the terminology a bit more.
The tools you see in the toolbar each have distinct settings and behaviors.
If you switch between them,
you might notice that the options and the top
R and particularly in the brush settings are different.
A brush in this case is a saved preset for these settings.
You can change the available brush settings freely at any point and
their settings will be saved to the brush you are currently using
if you want to reset the brush to the default settings at any point,
you can do it in brush
and clicking on
reset brush.
Or alternatively you can also press f. three and search for reset brush.
You can also create new brushes at any time in the brush settings.
To delete a brush properly. Hold shift
and click on the X. Icon
after reloading your file, the brush should be gone for good.
But let's actually go through the tools that are at your disposal
what they are for and what settings they provide.
So one thing you might notice is that the tools in the toolbar are color coded.
So blue generally stands for simple adding and subtracting of volume.
Red is increasing and decreasing contrast in different ways.
Yellow is for grabbing behavior instead of drawing lines on the surface
and gray is for tools that affect the model
in different ways like hiding or masking geometry,
but we'll get into all of these tools in a moment.
The default and topmost
is the draw tool.
This one is the simplest one out of the blue
selection with the main effect of adding and subtracting.
The direction that the brush pushes the geometry in is based on
the average normal direction of all the vortices within your brush radius.
If you don't know what normals are,
they are basically the direction that any vertex edge or face is facing towards
to have them visualized, you can enable the normal overlays in edit mode.
The shortcut for the draw tool is X.
The next two tools in the list of clay and clay strips which are very similar
just like draw they add and subtract but have
a secondary effect of flattening the affected surfaces.
This makes these brushes great for building
shapes and forms early on while sculpting
since they can easily replace previous strokes by
flattening them out while you add and remove
more volume.
The difference between the two is that clay strips uses a
square sharper profile while clay is very circular and smooth.
Instead
place trips is generally great as a more aggressive and rather version of the two
to build volumes and shapes.
The clay tool has the shortcut see while the
clay strips brush has no shortcut by default.
The layer tool is also for adding and subtracting but
has the extra settings to define a maximum height.
This way you can more precisely add strokes that won't exceed a certain
height and even make the heights persistent
for multiple strokes after one another.
This one shortcut is L.
The inflate tool is the most unique out of the blue ones
it adds and subtracts based on individual vertex normals instead of
the average of everything that is in your brush radius.
This makes the affected areas
essentially inflate and D. Or deflate,
which can be great when sculpting thin and small objects.
The shortcut for this tool is I
blob and crease are very similar to each other as well.
In addition to adding and subtracting,
they have the secondary effect of pinching or magnifying,
so essentially pulling the verses together
or apart.
This effect can be made stronger or weaker
in the brush settings by changing the pinch slider
with all these tools,
it's good to keep in mind that the main effect
like adding and subtracting can be inverted by holding control.
But the secondary effects in the brush settings
like pinching and flattening cannot be inverted.
Crease has the shortcut of shift. See all blob has none by default.
The first of the red tools is smooth.
This one is very straightforward since it has almost no brush options.
It smoothes the affected vertex is by averaging their position to each other.
Keep in mind that this also results in loss of volume, not just surface detail.
The common way of smoothing is holding shift,
but the tool also has the shortcut. S
after that comes flattened fill and scrape which are also similar to
each other while the flattening is a secondary effect for the clay brushes
in these particular tools, it's the main effect.
What these tools basically do is to push Virtus is within the brush radius
up or down to meet each other in the middle on an average height.
The fill and scrape tools are similar but only do this in one direction.
So the scrape brush is always pushing the Virtus is
down while the fill brushes always pushing them up.
These brushes can be a more aggressive way of
smoothing large sections of your surfaces or flattening areas completely
while holding control.
They will do the opposite though and essentially enhance the contrast
of your surfaces by pushing away from the average height,
you can also change the plane offset slider in the brush settings to define
the average height where these vortices meets.
So instead of meeting at the middle they can be
pushed further up and down to meet somewhere else.
Flattening has the shortcut of shift. T while scrape and Phil have none. By default
pinch is also very familiar.
Instead of only existing as a secondary effect for the crease and block brushes,
it also has its own tool,
so by default it will pull in or pinch your purchases
and when holding control it will push them apart or magnify.
This tool is using the shortcut. P
next in the list of the yellow tools. Starting with grap
with this one, you can move vortices within your radius
round by making them follow your mouths.
Holding control while doing this will not invert
the effect with these brushes but change the direction
to be consistent with the average normal direction
instead of following the mouse across the screen.
This effect is called normal weight and can also
be adjusted as a slider in the brush settings.
The shortcut for the grabbed war
is g. By default,
Snake hook is also very familiar to grab.
The behavior is different and interesting ways though,
instead of only moving the verges is that are
within your brush at the start of your stroke,
it lets them go and picks up more along the way.
This gives it an almost liquid like feeling.
With this brush, you can also basically pull out snakes from your object,
hence the name.
The two most important options for this tool
are rake and pinch in the brush settings.
When increasing rake. The geometry will follow the rotation of your brush stroke
while increasing pinch will avoid the loss of volume during that stroke.
The shortcut for this tool is shift K. By default,
the thumb and nudge tools are
each very similar to grab and snake hook,
they behave exactly like them,
but instead of moving the vortices around based on
the direction that you're looking at the mesh,
it moves them based on the average normals.
This way you can slide verses along the surface
of your object instead of along the screen.
The last of the red tools is rotate.
This one essentially twists the affected vertex is based on how long your stroke is
and the angle that you take.
It's a bit of an odd brush but it could be useful at times.
The great tools at the bottom are pretty simple actually.
We'll start with mask and skip, simplify for now until we talk about later settings.
What this brush allows you to do is to place
a mask on your geometry indicated by a dark color.
This mask will not be affected by any other brush.
A mask with the strength of one is shielding the affected areas from any changes.
While a mask of half the strength makes the
other brushes affect the surface only half a strong.
This brush can be incredibly helpful for many
things like sculpting overlapping areas or custom patterns.
You can hold control
to unmask areas
and hold shift to smooth the mask.
You can adjust how dark the mask appears
in the overlays with the mask slider.
You can even talk all the mask overlay off to make the mask temporarily invisible.
This can also be toggled with a shortcut Control M.
You can invert your mask with control I and remove it completely with old M.
Very similar to the mask tool. Is the box mask.
If you click and hold on the tool, it will actually reveal the lasso mask tool as well.
These are very similar to the regular box and lasso select an object and edit mode
at the moment. They unfortunately have no additional options
but they're surely coming for the next blender release.
You can also access the box masking with a shortcut B.
And that's why I'm asking with holding down control, shift and left mouse click.
It's important to know these types of masking are infinitely deep.
So box masking will also select through your surfaces
and affect the other side of your model.
The last great tool is box hiding,
which can be a quick way of hiding geometry and sculpt mode.
Hiding geometry is not just invisible but also unaffected by tools.
Any geometry that is hidden in edit mode is also hidden in sculpt mode.
The last tool in the list is annotate to draw annotations just like in any other mode.
To get a bit deeper into the tools.
I will also explain the most common brush settings.
This will not be an extensive overview.
So again I can recommend to visit the blender manual if you have any questions
in the right mouse button menu or pressing F1 or hovering over any setting.
All these tools settings can be found in the top bar and the sidebar
as well as the tool settings. Tab in the properties editor to the right.
Some of the ones that are most exposed, our radius and strength and they are part of
basically every brush and sculpt mode.
For the most part you will be changing these via the shortcut.
F and shift F like mentioned before,
but the slightest can give you an overview on what they are currently set to.
You can also enable the button next to them to enable pressure sensitivity.
This will adjust the setting based on how much
pressure you apply with your pen on the tablet.
The setting is not relevant for mouse users though.
The next most use settings are the ones that are tied to holding control
namely the direction of your brush or the plus and minus in the tool settings
like I mentioned before.
This is to invert the main effect of your brush holding control with grab, snake,
hook, nudge, and thumb though
Instead inverts the normal weight.
You also have more advanced settings in the brush drop down here
you can adjust the behavior of your brush in more detailed ways.
A very common brush setting for almost every brush is auto smooth,
which adds a secondary smoothing effect for your brush stroke.
You can enable pressure sensitivity on a lot of these settings as well.
For example enabling pressure sensitivity on both.
The strength and auto smooth has the effect of applying more pressure to add or
subtract volume and applying less pressure to get more of a smoothing effect.
More examples for brush settings are settings like pinch
rake and plane offset which we mentioned before.
Another very common one is accumulate which removes the strength cap of
your brush and lets you infinitely apply the stroke on your surface.
You can also apply textures to your brushes.
This allows you to use patterns for your
brushes instead of just the usual circular fall off
for this. You can click on new
and or select an existing texture from the texture list.
New textures are blank by default so
to load an image to your texture,
you need to go to the texture tab and the properties editor
and select create or open a new image from the file browser.
Once an image is selected, you can rename the texture for organizations sake
for textures you have a variety of options in the tool settings.
You can for example change the mapping which will change
the way the texture is being projected through your brush.
You can also change the angle of your texture or enable rake to make
it follow the rotation of your stroke just like with the snake hook brush.
The offset and size architecture is also freely adjustable below.
For your stroke you can also change the behavior.
The default stroke method is often space which applies the brush
strength every time after a certain distance in your stroke,
increase the spacing and he will get dots that are further apart and
decrease it to get a very smooth but also very strong stroke.
Smooth stroke is also often used and has the shortcut shift. S to toggle it.
The effect this has on the brush is like dragging a paint brush along a rubber band.
You can change the radius and factor to make the stroke more or less smooth.
The fall of curve settings are relatively simple.
You're sculpting stroke always has a profile
by default. It's using a smooth curve
that you can see in these settings
or by pressing F or shift F.
You can either manually change the curve to be sharper or rounder
by adding and moving points or even make a completely custom profile.
Points on the curve are added and moved by
left clicking
and you can remove them easily by dragging them to the end points of the curve.
You can also just select a preset which will give you the most optimal results
with the display options. You can change the look of your brush
but not much functionality wise.
And then further down in the tool settings, we finally get to symmetry
these options,
let you mirror or duplicate your stroke on your object while you sculpt
the most basic ways to use symmetry is to total X. Y and or Z.
Mirror to mirror your stroke across a certain axis.
The symmetry options will use the origin of the object
and its rotation as the center axis of where to mirror your strokes from.
You can also lock and tile your stroke and certain axes.
Even radio symmetry is available to repeat
strokes multiple times around your object.
Unfortunately there's no dynamic preview of these points
where it's going to be murdered or duplicated.
But this is a feature that is coming for the next version of blender.
Lastly it's time to talk about adaptive sculpting methods.
You could of course just sculpt on your subdivided cube.
But there are better ways of providing you with more resolution to sculpt on
one of them. Is dynamic topology or dine topo.
In short you can find it towards the end of your tool settings. Usually
when enabled your sculpting brushes will dynamically tessalit
your surfaces to add or remove detail.
This way you don't really have to worry about running out of
geometry to sculpt on because it will always auto generated for you.
You can enable dynamic topology with a shortcut control D.
You might get a warning message when trying
to enable the enemy topology letting you know
that it will not preserve some object data
like you ve vertex groups and vertex colors
since it constantly re measures your geometry,
this will delete any of this data that you might have
So keep that in mind.
Dynamic topology will also not preview any modify as you might have active
within the dynamic topology options.
You can then change a couple of settings and are presented with more options.
One of them is the method of re meshing that is being used.
You can set it to constant detail which has a
set constant detailed level that every new triangle is using.
This way the resolution will remain consistent across the object.
You can change the resolution value manually or pick a resolution
from the three D view port with the picker icon.
The higher the value
the more dense the geometry.
If you change the method to relative detail.
On the other hand, it will base the resolution on how far you zoomed into your model.
The resolution gets renamed to detail size and now
it relates to the screen size of the triangles.
Set the number to a lower amount of pixels for denser geometry,
the other two methods are used less but what they do is simple brush detail
ties the resolution to the brush size and how far you zoomed into your model.
And manual detail on the other hand,
doesn't dynamically remesch by using the brushes which
leads me to the extra options below.
When using constant or manual detail, you can flood fill
the set resolution to your entire object.
This is the only way to remesch when using manual detail
but also very useful at times when you're using constant detail.
You can also symmetries the object by re meshing 1/2
to copy the other half of your geometry.
Just set a symmetry axis
and click the button to make your model perfectly symmetrical.
The optimized button optimizes the performance of your view port.
Should it become particularly slow.
Almost all brushes are using dynamic apology,
but the simplified tool is the one that exclusively reacts to it.
There is also another way of adding more geometry to your
object apart from dynamic topology and that is multi resolution.
This is a modifier that can be added in the modifier, tap and the Properties editor.
This adds an interface to add subdivisions to your object
while being able to sculpt on the individual levels.
You can set different levels of your subdivisions to be visible
in your view port preview. In general
sculpt mode specifically and doing rendering.
I can recommend to always leave it at Catmull Clark Since
Simple just adds more geometry without smoothing the results.
And those are the basics. The rest can be found in the online manual for blender