Voxel Sculpt
Shapes in Voxel mode are a recipe: sizes, corners and cuts you can retype at any time. Freehand detail is sculpted on the surface built from that recipe, in the Sculpt tab. This page covers how the two meet, and Flatten, which bakes shapes into one solid object when a tool needs one.
Sculpting a voxel model
In a voxel document there is no separate step to make a mesh. The line above the button at the foot of the Voxel sidebar says where the surface stands:
- Surface: built when you open Sculpt, Paint or Retopology. — switch to the Sculpt tab and the surface is built for you.
- Surface: up to date. — the surface matches the shapes.
- Surface: behind the shapes -- rebuilt when you leave this tab. — you have changed shapes since the last build.
- Surface: behind the shapes, and sculpted or painted. Rebuilding replaces that work. — see the warning below.
Build Surface Now builds the surface in the background straight away, instead of waiting for you to leave the tab.
Once you have sculpted, coming back to the Voxel tab brings the sculpt in as one locked node. You can keep blocking out around it: shapes you add or cut merge into the sculpt when you go back to Sculpt, Paint or Retopology, and the rest of the sculpt keeps its detail. That makes it easy to sculpt a head, return to Voxel mode to cut an eye socket or add a horn, and carry on sculpting.
When the surface has been sculpted or painted, the button reads Rebuild Surface (replaces sculpting). Rebuilding makes the surface again from the shapes and replaces the sculpted and painted work.
The Voxel palette has no sculpting brushes of its own in this version. Sculpt in the Sculpt tab.
Flatten
Flatten bakes a node, and everything under it, into one object. Right-click the node in the Voxel Tree and choose Flatten. If the node you right-click is part of a selection of several, the item reads Flatten Selected and bakes them all into one object, named after the highest of them in the tree.
The flattened object is one shape like any other: it keeps its parts' colours, and you can still resize it, deform it, blend it and cut with it. What it loses is the parts themselves — their sizes and corner settings stop being numbers you can retype — and sharp edges soften to the bake's resolution. Undo brings the parts back.
The menu item's tooltip says what the bake will cost before you pay it, in samples and megabytes. Select a flattened node and the Numeric window shows the same, in the form Flattened: one object, X x Y x Z samples (N MB).
When you need to flatten
- Offset and Shell work on single shapes. With a group selected, the Numeric window says to flatten it first and offers a Flatten button.
- A Drag Net cannot be dragged again while it is still a Drag Net. The Numeric window says so and offers Flatten; once flattened, the next net deforms the baked shape. See Taper, Twist, Bend, Shear & Drag Net.
- Live clones follow their original until it is flattened.
Curves have Freeze Curve in the same menu instead, and a node that is already one flattened object offers Remesh.
Remesh and Flatten detail
Remesh bakes a flattened object again at the current resolution. It keeps its shape, and it can make an object baked at a coarser setting as fine as a new one — but detail the earlier bake already lost does not come back.
The resolution comes from Flatten detail (million samples) in the Settings window, from 1 to 48 (8 by default). A flatten samples at half the voxel size unless this caps it, and a baked shape rounds its corners by about one sample, so a higher number keeps sharper corners on big shapes. It costs memory — the line under the slider shows the most each flattened shape may take — and makes the view slower to redraw while the shape changes.