Sculpting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 66

Brush selector

Only Render
option

Enable pressure sensitivity for this setting

Brush settings

Further Brush options;
click arrows to expand

Viewport Shading method
(here set to Textured)

Figure 6-1: Sculpt mode, with the Viewport display mode set to Textured (with GLSL shading) and Only Render enabled.
The Tool Shelf, on the left, contains most of Blender's sculpting tools and options.

Brush textures use the brightness of the tex-
ture to determine how strongly to apply the
brushstroke. While you can use color images
for brushes, it's more common to simply use
black and white textures to make it easier to
judge their effects. (In order to distinguish
brush textures from other kinds of textures,
I'll often refer to them as alphas .)

Brush Options

The Brush options are shown at the left of Figure 6-1.
Click a selected mesh in the 3D Viewport to begin
sculpting.
Running down the list of panels in the Tool
Shelf at the left of Figure 6-1 in order (some are col-
lapsed, but their titles are all visible), we have the
following:

Tool While the brushes in the Brush selector have
names like Clay and Smooth, you can change
these names as you please. The actual behavior
of any brush is determined by the choices you
make in the drop-down menu in this panel,
which allows you to choose from all of the base
tool types Blender has to offer before customiz-
ing them further.

Brush Here, you can select which brush to use;
the brush properties, such as radius, strength,
and autosmooth; whether the brush should
add or subtract from the surface; and some
options specific to individual brushes. You can
also create new brushes from the Brush selector
by clicking the + icon. Doing so will duplicate
the current brush, creating a copy that you can
modify separately.

Stroke This panel contains options for how
your mouse or tablet strokes are converted into
sculpting strokes. The default method for most
brushes, Space , creates a uniform brushstroke.
Anchored allows you to click and drag out a large

Text u re This panel allows you to create strokes
with unique shapes and textures or to drag
out patterns onto the surface of your mesh.