Tutorials ModelCraft help Walkthroughs
Sculpt a mesh
Shape a mesh like clay with brushes — draw, clay, smooth, grab, inflate, crease, pinch, flatten — protect parts with a mask, mirror across X, and add detail where you sculpt.
Written for ModelCraft 0.7.1. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
The Sculpt workspace shapes a mesh with brushes, as with clay: drag across the surface and it rises, sinks, smooths or follows the pointer under a round brush, strongest in the middle and fading to nothing at its rim.
Start
Select a mesh and pick Sculpt in the Workspace list. A group or component becomes a mesh first, as in the Mesh workspace. Brushes work on the mesh's vertices, so a mesh with more of them takes finer shapes: subdivide it first (the Mesh workspace's Subdivide, or a Subdivision surface modifier you Apply), or turn Detail on.
Brushes
| Brush | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Draw | DD | Raises the surface under the brush |
| Clay | CC | Builds up flat layers, filling dips first |
| Smooth | SS | Evens out bumps; hold ⇧Shift to smooth with any brush |
| Grab | GG | Pulls the surface along with the pointer |
| Inflate | II | Swells the surface out along its own direction |
| Crease | ⇧CShift+C | Cuts a sharp groove |
| Pinch | PP | Draws the surface towards the brush's middle |
| Flatten | TT | Presses the surface towards its average plane |
| Mask | MM | Paints a mask that protects the surface from the other brushes |
Hold ⌃Ctrl while stroking to work the other way (lower instead of raise, a ridge instead of a groove, remove the mask), or turn Take away on.
Size and strength
The brush's size is in pixels on the screen, so it feels the same however far you zoom: [[ and ]] make it smaller and bigger, ⇧[Shift+[ and ⇧]Shift+] change its strength. The panel shows both.
With a pen on a tablet, pressing harder makes the brush bigger and stronger; the panel turns either off.
Mirror, mask and detail
- Mirror X (XX) sculpts both sides across red at once, for faces and figures.
- The mask shows darker while you sculpt. Clear mask (⌥MAlt+M) takes it off, Invert mask (⌃ICtrl+I) masks what was free and frees what was masked. The mask is kept with the mesh.
- Detail adds triangles where you sculpt: edges longer than the size set in the panel (pixels on the screen) are split under the brush. It needs a mesh of triangles, and asks to make one first.
Each stroke is one undo step.
See also Edit a mesh, Meshes and Modifiers on a mesh.