Sculpt Brushes

The sculpt brushes live on the icon toolbar while the sidebar is on the Sculpt tab: twelve tool buttons, then the Stencil and Stroke Tool toggles. Pick a tool there, and shape how it behaves in the sidebar's Brush Settings section. A brush works on whichever mesh the viewport is showing — the Loaded Mesh or the Generated Mesh.

The twelve tools

Each button's tooltip gives the tool's name. Dragging with the left mouse button sculpts; Shift+drag runs the same tool inverted for that stroke (see Inverting a stroke).

Tool	What it does
Sculpt Brush	The default clay tool. Pushes the patch under the brush out along its average direction, building up a raised patch rather than a smooth dome. Inverted, it digs in.
Inflate Brush	Pushes every point out along its own normal, fattening a form. Inverted, it deflates.
Smooth Brush	Relaxes the surface by averaging each point with its neighbours — for scan noise, lumps and stretched spots.
Flatten Brush	Pulls the surface under the brush toward the plane of its own average, carving bumps down to a flat patch.
Pinch Brush	Gathers points toward the brush centre, sharpening a soft edge. Inverted, it pushes them apart.
Crease Brush	A pinch plus a push concentrated at the brush core, raising a crisp ridge along the stroke. Inverted, it carves a crisp valley.
Fill Brush	Raises only what lies below the brush's plane — fills valleys and pits and never touches peaks. Inverted, it scrapes.
Scrape Brush	Lowers only what sits above the brush's plane — planes bumps off and never touches hollows. Inverted, it fills.
Grab Brush	Catches the surface under the brush when you press and moves it with the drag. Releasing back where you started puts the surface back exactly.
Rotate Brush	Catches the surface the same way and twists it: the middle turns hardest and the rim barely moves.
Layer Brush	Raises the surface to a fixed plateau above where it sat when the stroke began. Crossing your own stroke does not stack it higher. Inverted, it sinks an inlay instead.
Mask	Paints protection: masked surface is held back from the other tools — fully where the mask is solid, partly where it is soft. Shift+drag erases the mask. While it is selected, the sidebar shows the mask tools; see Sculpt Masking.
Alpha Drag	Stamps one image: press for the centre, drag to size and turn it, release to lay it. White raises the surface by the stamp's greyscale, and you see the result live while you drag. The same tool is in Paint; see Alpha Drag.

The two toggles after the tools compose with whichever tool is selected rather than replacing it:

Toggle	What it does
Stencil	Shapes each sculpt dab with the selected stencil image, wherever it is shown in the viewport, so a pattern carves into the surface exactly where the overlay sits. Its settings are in the sidebar's Stencil section. While it is on, right-drag moves the stencil instead of orbiting.
Stroke Tool	Click the model to lay a curve; the selected sculpt brush sculpts along it into a sculpt layer of its own. See Sculpt Paths.

The last button, Text, puts the brush away while it is on (picking a brush turns it off again): click the model and type to emboss or engrave words into it, paint them, or make them a 3D mesh of their own. See Text.

Size, softness and strength

Brush Settings holds the sliders every tool uses:

Control	What it does
Brush radius	Brush size in screen pixels, so it stays the same size on screen as you zoom or orbit. Shared with the Paint tab.
Brush falloff	How soft the brush's edge is: 0 is a hard edge, 1 fades all the way from the centre. The Falloff curve under it sets the shape of that fade.
Intensity	How strongly each dab moves the surface, from 0 to 1.
Maximum Intensity	An optional ceiling on how far the surface can move — see below.
Smoothing	Drags the brush behind the cursor on a string while you sculpt, filtering out hand jitter. 0 is off.
Brush spacing	How far the brush moves, as a percentage of its radius, before stamping again. Raise it if sculpting feels slow or choppy with a large brush.

You can change the main three without going to the sidebar. With the cursor over the model, by default:

Change	Mouse	Keys
Radius	Shift+Wheel	] / [, or D to drag it
Falloff	Ctrl+Wheel (wheel up hardens)	Alt+] / Alt+[
Intensity	Alt+Wheel	Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[, or Shift+D to drag it

D and Shift+D show a ring at the cursor; move the mouse to set the value, then click or press the key again to keep it. Over empty background, Alt+Wheel and Ctrl+Wheel adjust the lighting instead.

A pen's pressure drives the dab's size and intensity; its settings are in the sidebar's Pen Settings section.

Per-tool settings

With Per-tool settings on (the default), each of the twelve tools remembers its own radius, falloff and intensity, and they are swapped in as you switch tools. Smooth wants wide and soft, Crease wants tight and strong — with this off, all twelve tools share one set of sliders and you re-dial on every switch. The radius is the one the Paint tab uses too, so switching sculpt tools also changes the size Paint shows.

Inverting a stroke

Hold Shift and drag on the model to run the selected tool the other way for that stroke: Sculpt Brush digs, Inflate deflates, Crease carves a valley, Fill scrapes and Scrape fills. It is a gesture rather than a setting, so it cannot be left on by accident. The right mouse button orbits the camera in this tab; it does not invert.

Shaping the stroke

Control	What it does
Brush image picker	The top of Brush Settings. Give the brush a greyscale image (an alpha) and it sculpts texture rather than form; the round brush has none. The selection is shared with the Paint tab. Grab Brush and Rotate Brush ignore the alpha.
Rake Brush	Rotates the brush image to follow the direction of the stroke, so a directional pattern runs along it. Needs a brush image.
Drop Brush	Skips the dab on the initial click and waits until the stroke starts moving — with Rake Brush on, the first dab then already points along the stroke.
Aligned Brush	Treats the alpha as a pattern fixed to the surface rather than a stamp on each dab. See Aligned Brush.
Build up	Lets one stroke keep building where its dabs overlap. Off (the default), a stroke goes one dab deep however many dabs land in it; a new stroke over the same place builds up either way. Smooth and Relax are never held back: they keep smoothing for as long as the stroke goes on, so scrubbing back and forth keeps evening the surface out. Shared with the Paint tab.
Front faces only	Only moves surface facing you. Off, the brush reaches through a thin form — an ear, a fin, cloth — and moves the back of it too. On by default.

For a straight stroke, Shift+click the model: a line of dabs runs from where the last stroke ended to the click. Ctrl+Shift+click snaps that line to 15° steps.

Maximum Intensity

Normally, going over the same area again keeps pushing it further. Tick the checkbox at the start of the Maximum Intensity row and the slider becomes a ceiling: no point can end up further than that from where the surface was when you switched it on, measured as a fraction of the brush radius. Passing over an area again stops adding displacement once it reaches the cap, whatever tool you use.

The circular-arrows button at the end of the row, Re-base, treats the surface as it is now as the new zero, so you can bank a finished layer of detail and keep sculpting on top of it up to the cap again.

Undo

Ctrl+Z undoes a stroke and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes it. Sculpting keeps its own undo history, separate from painting's.