Clone, Blur, Smudge & Eraser

Four of the tools in the Paint mode's tool row do not lay down colour of their own. They move, soften or remove what is already on the surface. They share the whole brush system — radius, falloff, spacing, smoothing, pressure, masks and stencils all apply — and they write into the same channels and the same layers as the Paint Brush.

Clone Brush

The Clone Brush stamps from somewhere else. Alt+click the mesh to set a source point — a ring marks it — then paint, and every dab copies what is at the matching offset from that ring. The swatch beside the tool shows what the brush would clone from right now, so you can see the source before you commit a stroke.

The source does not have to be the mesh. Click the Scratch Pad to clone from the pad instead, or use an image in the Image View. Whichever you pick, the brush follows the channel list in the sidebar: it clones every channel you have armed, including the Normal Map, and a cloned normal map keeps its relief pointing the right way rather than being copied as flat colour.

Two settings change how the source tracks the brush:

• Aligned — on, the source keeps the same offset from the brush across separate strokes, until the next Alt+click. Off, every new stroke resamples from the original Alt+click point.
• Surface Normal — on, every dab lies flat on the surface under it and the source walks with the brush, so the texture wraps around the form. Off, the stamp is a flat decal projected from where the stroke began, which stretches wherever the surface turns away from you. This applies to Scratch Pad and Image View sources too.

Blur Brush

The Blur Brush softens what is under it rather than painting over it. Blur strength sets how far the kernel reaches; at low values it takes the edge off a hard stroke, at high values it dissolves detail entirely. It gathers its samples across the surface rather than across the flat texture, so it reaches into the UV padding and past island boundaries — blurring across a seam does not leave a hard line where the atlas happens to cut.

Blur works on the colour and greyscale channels only, so picking it switches Color/Albedo on and — by the same exclusion rule — the Normal Map off. Softening a normal map means averaging directions rather than averaging colours, which is a different operation, so the Normal Map section carries a Blur mode of its own for that.

Smudge Brush

Smudge drags what is under the brush along the stroke, the way a finger pulls wet paint, fading out toward the brush edge. Smudge strength controls how much of the surface comes with you: low values leave a faint pull, high values carry colour a long way before it fades. It is the tool for breaking up an edge that reads as too clean, or for pulling a highlight into a streak. Like Blur, it works on the colour and greyscale channels only.

Eraser

The Eraser removes paint rather than painting the background colour over it — on a layer above the base, erasing exposes what is underneath. It obeys the same brush shape, falloff and dynamics as everything else.

If you paint with a stylus, Use eraser end to erase in Pen Settings lets you flip the pen over and rub out without changing tools.