 In this video, I'll go over the fundamentals of Blender Sculpt Mode. I'll try to keep this video as short as possible and only talk about the essential Sculpt Mode related features. A lot more can be found and looked up further on the Blender Manual. If you might have any questions on how a setting in the interface works, you can always right-click on anything in the interface and click on Online Manual or hover over it with the mouse and press F1. This will take you directly to the official documentation of any particular feature in the interface. These fundamentals I will be talking about might not seem like much, but don't mistake that for lacking depth for the sculpting workflow. Most other features, modes and editors are kind of feeding into the possibilities of Blender as a sculpting tool. There will also be features that I will be intentionally leaving out to not make this video too bloated or complex. Also, before we start, I can highly recommend you to get a pen tablet to really get the most out of sculpting, drawing and painting in Blender. There are many settings that relate to pressure sensitivity and sculpting with a pen is generally faster, easier, more comfortable and ergonomic for your hands. It doesn't need to be a very expensive pen display. There are many affordable options for tablets on the market. So if you're not familiar at all with sculpting in digital software, then look at it more like traditional sculpting with clay. Instead of modifying the geometry of your object in edit mode, you are dynamically adding, removing and moving around the shapes of your object to affect your surfaces and volumes more freely and dynamically. To enter sculpt mode in Blender, you can switch the mode in the top left corner of the 3D viewport or use the pie menu with the shortcut control tab. This will change the options in the interface and replace your cursor with a brush circle. The way you interact with your object in sculpt mode is generally to left click onto the surface of your object. By default, you are using the draw brush. Any vertices within the brush radius are then pushed outwards. Holding CTRL while doing this will result in the opposite effect, in this case pushing the affected vertices inwards. When holding SHIFT, it will smooth the affected vertices. Press F to change the scale of your brush and left click to apply the change. Also press SHIFT F to change the strength of your brush. All these settings can be seen and changed in the tool settings in the top bar and the sidebar of your 3D viewport. If you cannot see these areas of the interface, the way to toggle them is by using the shortcut T for the toolbar, N for the sidebar and looking into the tab called tool and right mouse button clicking on the header and enabling tool settings to get the top bar. It's not called top bar anymore. It was at some point during the development of Blender 2.8. So the name kind of stuck with me and it's going to stay there for a while. You can also toggle these areas while clicking on View and toggling them there. There might also be a bit of confusion with the difference between tools and brushes. So to explain the terminology a bit more, the tools you see in the toolbar each have distinct settings and behaviors. If you switch between them, you might notice that the options in the top bar and particularly in the brush settings are different. A brush in this case is a saved preset for these settings. You can change the available brush settings freely at any point and their settings will be saved to the brush you are currently using. If you want to reset the brush to the default settings at any point, you can do it in brush and clicking on reset brush. Or alternatively, you can also press F3 and search for reset brush. You can also create new brushes at any time in the brush settings. To delete a brush properly, hold Shift and click on the X icon. After reloading your file, the brush should be gone for good. But let's actually go through the tools that are at your disposal, what they are for and what settings they provide. So one thing you might notice is that the tools in the toolbar are color coded. So blue generally stands for simple adding and subtracting of volume. Red is increasing and decreasing contrast in different ways. Yellow is for grabbing behavior instead of drawing lines on the surface. And gray is for tools that affect the model in different ways, like hiding or masking geometry. But we'll get into all of these tools in a moment. The default and topmost is the draw tool. This one is the simplest one out of the blue selection with the main effect of adding and subtracting. The direction that the brush pushes the geometry in is based on the average normal direction of all the vertices within your brush radius. If you don't know what normals are, they are basically the direction that any vertex, edge or face is facing towards. To have them visualized, you can enable the normal overlays in edit mode. The shortcut for the draw tool is X. The next two tools in the list are clay and clay strips, which are very similar. Just like draw, they add and subtract, but have a secondary effect of flattening the affected surfaces. This makes these brushes great for building shapes and forms early on while sculpting, since they can easily replace previous strokes by flattening them out while you add and remove more volume. The difference between the two is that clay strips uses a square, sharper profile while clay is very circular and smooth instead. Clay strips is generally great as a more aggressive and rougher version of the two to build volumes and shapes. The clay tool has the shortcut C while the clay strips brush has no shortcut by default. The layer tool is also for adding and subtracting, but has the extra settings to define a maximum height. This way you can more precisely add strokes that won't exceed a certain height and even make the heights persistent for multiple strokes after one another. This one shortcut is L. The inflate tool is the most unique out of the blue ones. It adds and subtracts based on individual vertex normals instead of the average of everything that is in your brush radius. This makes the affected areas essentially inflate and de- or deflate, which can be great when sculpting thin and small objects. The shortcut for this tool is I. Blob and crease are very similar to each other as well. In addition to adding and subtracting, they have the secondary effect of pinching or magnifying. So essentially pulling the vertices together or apart. This effect can be made stronger or weaker in the brush settings by changing the pinch slider. With all these tools, it's good to keep in mind that the main effect, like adding and subtracting, can be inverted by holding CTRL, but the secondary effects in the brush settings, like pinching and flattening, cannot be inverted. Crease has the shortcut of Shift C, while Blob has none by default. The first of the red tools is Smooth. This one is very straightforward, since it has almost no brush options. It smooths the affected vertices by averaging their position to each other. Keep in mind that this also results in loss of volume, not just surface detail. The common way of smoothing is holding Shift, but the tool also has the shortcut S. After that comes Flatten, Fill and Scrape, which are also similar to each other. While the flattening is a secondary effect for the clay brushes, in these particular tools it's the main effect. What these tools basically do is to push vertices within the brush radius up or down to meet each other in the middle on an average height. The Fill and Scrape tools are similar, but only do this in one direction, so the Scrape brush is always pushing the vertices down, while the Fill brush is always pushing them up. These brushes can be a more aggressive way of smoothing large sections of your surfaces or flattening areas completely. While holding CTRL, they will do the opposite though and essentially enhance the contrast of your surfaces by pushing away from the average height. You can also change the plane offset slider in the brush settings to define the average height where these vertices meet. So instead of meeting at the middle, they can be pushed further up and down to meet somewhere else. Flattening has the shortcut of SHIFT T, while Scrape and Fill have none by default. Pinch is also very familiar. Instead of only existing as a secondary effect for the crease and blob brushes, it also has its own tool. So by default it will pull in or pinch your vertices and when holding CTRL, it will push them apart or magnify. This tool is using the shortcut P. Next in the list are the yellow tools starting with Grab. With this one you can move vertices within your radius around by making them follow your mouse. Holding CTRL while doing this will not invert the effect with these brushes, but change the direction to be consistent with the average normal direction instead of following the mouse across the screen. This effect is called normal weight and can also be adjusted as a slider in the brush settings. The shortcut for the Grab tool is G by default. Snakehook is also very familiar to Grab. The behavior is different in interesting ways though. Instead of only moving the vertices that are within your brush at the start of your stroke, it lets them go and picks up more along the way. This gives it an almost liquid like feeling. With this brush you can also basically pull out snakes from your object, hence the name. The two most important options for this tool are rake and pinch in the brush settings. When increasing rake, the geometry will follow the rotation of your brush stroke while increasing pinch will avoid the loss of volume during that stroke. The shortcut for this tool is SHIFT-K by default. The thumb and notch tools are each very similar to Grab and Snakehook. They behave exactly like them, but instead of moving the vertices around based on the direction that you are looking at the mesh, it moves them based on the average normals. This way you can slide vertices along the surface of your object instead of along the screen. The last of the red tools is ROTATE. This one essentially twists the affected vertices based on how long your stroke is and the angle that you take. It's a bit of an odd brush, but it could be useful at times. The gray tools at the bottom are pretty simple actually. We'll start with MASK and skip simplify for now until we talk about later settings. What this brush allows you to do is to place a mask on your geometry indicated by a dark color. This mask will not be affected by any other brush. A mask with the strength of 1 is shielding the affected areas from any changes while a mask of half the strength makes the other brushes affect the surface only half a strong. This brush can be incredibly helpful for many things like sculpting overlapping areas or custom patterns. You can hold CTRL to unmask areas and hold SHIFT to smooth the mask. You can adjust how dark the mask appears in the overlays with the mask slider. You can even toggle the mask overlay off to make the mask temporarily invisible. This can also be toggled with a shortcut CTRL M. You can invert your mask with CTRL I and remove it completely with ALT M. Very similar to the MASK tool is the BOX mask. If you click and hold on the tool it will actually reveal the LASSO mask tool as well. These are very similar to the regular BOX and LASSO SELECT in object and edit mode. At the moment they unfortunately have no additional options but they are surely coming for the next blender release. You can also access the BOX masking with the shortcut B and LASSO masking with holding down CTRL SHIFT and left mouse click. It's important to know these types of masking are infinitely deep so BOX masking will also select through your surfaces and affect the other side of your model. The last great tool is BOX HIDING which can be a quick way of hiding geometry in scope mode. Hiding geometry is not just invisible but also unaffected by tools. Any geometry that is hidden in edit mode is also hidden in scope mode. The last tool in the list is ANOTATE to draw annotations just like in any other mode. To get a bit deeper into the tools I will also explain the most common brush settings. This will not be an extensive overview so again I can recommend to visit the blender manual if you have any questions in the right mouse button menu or pressing F1 while hovering over any setting. All these tool settings can be found in the top bar and the sidebar as well as the tool settings tab in the properties editor to the right. Some of the ones that are the most exposed are RADIUS and STRENGTH and they are part of basically every brush in scope mode. For the most part you will be changing these via the shortcut F and SHIFT F like mentioned before but the sliders can give you an overview on what they are currently set to. You can also enable the button next to them to enable pressure sensitivity. This will adjust the setting based on how much pressure you apply with your pen on the tablet. This setting is not relevant for mouse users though. The next most used settings are the ones that are tied to holding CTRL namely the direction of your brush or the plus and minus in the tool settings. Like I mentioned before this is to invert the main effect of your brush. Holding CTRL with grab, snake hook, nudge and thumb though instead inverts the normal weight. You also have more advanced settings in the brush dropdown. Here you can adjust the behavior of your brush in more detailed ways. A very common brush setting for almost every brush is autosmooth which adds a secondary smoothing effect for your brush stroke. You can enable pressure sensitivity on a lot of these settings as well. For example enabling pressure sensitivity on both the strength and autosmooth has the effect of applying more pressure to add or subtract volume and applying less pressure to get more of a smoothing effect. More examples for brush settings are settings like pinch, rake and plane offset which we mentioned before. Another very common one is accumulate which removes the strength cap of your brush and lets you infinitely apply the stroke on your surface. You can also apply textures to your brushes. This allows you to use patterns for your brushes instead of just the usual circular falloff. For this you can click on new or select an existing texture from the texture list. New textures are blank by default so to load an image to your texture you need to go to the texture tab in the properties editor and select create or open a new image from the file browser. Once an image is selected you can rename the texture for organization's sake. For textures you have a variety of options in the tool settings. You can for example change the mapping which will change the way the texture is being projected through your brush. You can also change the angle of your texture or enable rake to make it follow the rotation of your stroke just like with a snakehawk brush. The offset and size of your texture is also freely adjustable below. For your stroke you can also change the behavior. The default stroke method is often space which applies the brush strength every time after a certain distance in your stroke. Increase the spacing and you will get dots that are further apart and decrease it to get a very smooth but also very strong stroke. Smooth stroke is also often used and has the shortcut shift S to toggle it. The effect this has on the brush is like dragging a paintbrush along a rubber band. You can change the radius and factor to make the stroke more or less smooth. The falloff curve settings are relatively simple. Your sculpting stroke always has a profile. By default it's using a smooth curve that you can see in these settings or by pressing F or shift F. You can either manually change the curve to be sharper or rounder by adding and moving points or even make a completely custom profile. Points in the curve are added and moved by left clicking and you can remove them easily by dragging them to the endpoints of the curve. You can also just select a preset which will give you the most optimal results. With the display options you can change the look of your brush but not much functionality wise. And then further down in the tool settings we finally get to symmetry. These options let you mirror or duplicate your stroke on your object while you sculpt. The most basic ways to use symmetry is to toggle X, Y and or Z mirror. To mirror your stroke across a certain axis. These symmetry options will use the origin of the object and its rotation as the center axis of where to mirror your strokes from. You can also lock and tile your stroke in certain axes. Even radial symmetry is available to repeat strokes multiple times around your object. Unfortunately there is no dynamic preview of these points where it's going to be mirrored or duplicated but this is a feature that is coming for the next version of Blender. Lastly it's time to talk about adaptive sculpting methods. You could of course just sculpt on your subdivided cube but there are better ways of providing you with more resolution to sculpt on. One of them is dynamic topology or Dyntopo in short. You can find it towards the end of your tool settings usually. When enabled your sculpting brushes will dynamically tessellate your surfaces to add or remove detail. This way you don't really have to worry about running out of geometry to sculpt on because it will always auto generate it for you. You can enable dynamic topology with a shortcut Ctrl D. You might get a warning message when trying to enable dynamic topology letting you know that it will not preserve some object data like UVs, vertex groups and vertex colors. Since it constantly remaches your geometry this will delete any of this data that you might have. So keep that in mind. Dynamic topology will also not preview any modifiers you might have active. Within the dynamic topology options you can then change a couple of settings and are presented with more options. One of them is the method of remashing that is being used. You can set it to constant detail which has a set constant detail level that every new triangle is using. This way the resolution will remain consistent across the object. You can change the resolution value manually or pick a resolution from the 3D viewport with the picker icon. The higher the value the more dense the geometry. If you change the method to relative detail on the other hand it will base the resolution on how far you zoomed into your model. The resolution gets renamed to detail size and now it relates to the screen size of the triangles. Set the number to a lower amount of pixels for denser geometry. The other two methods are used less but what they do is simple. Brush detail ties the resolution to the brush size and how far you zoomed into your model and manual detail on the other hand doesn't dynamically remesh by using the brushes which leads me to the extra options below. When using constant or manual detail you can flood fill the set resolution to your entire object. This is the only way to remesh when using manual detail but also very useful at times when you're using constant detail. You can also symmetrize your object by remeshing one half to copy the other half of your geometry. Just set a symmetry axis and click the button to make your model perfectly symmetrical. The optimize button optimizes the performance of your viewport should it become particularly slow. Almost all brushes are using dynamic topology but the simplified tool is the one that exclusively reacts to it. There's also another way of adding more geometry to your object apart from dynamic topology and that is multi resolution. This is a modifier that can be added in the modifier tab in the properties editor. This adds an interface to add subdivisions to your object while being able to sculpt on the individual levels. You can set different levels of your subdivisions to be visible in your viewport preview in general, sculpt mode specifically and during rendering. I can recommend to always leave it at catmol clock since simple just adds more geometry without smoothing the results. And those are the basics. The rest can be found in the online manual for Blender.