https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4pqhhmUrNg
The transform tool is not sculpting tool, but it can be used for
very rough, very quick sculpting like stuff. But if you really want to be
creative you’ve to use sculpting tools.
Now I am in the paint layout tab. But In fact you don’t need
that tab at all. It may be a good starting point because in the lower right
part of the screen you can see how your brush is looking like. And you can
adjust the settings of the brush and see what these settings do. But you can
open the sculpting palette anywhere on the program by pressing the f3 key. That
will open little floating sculpting tool palette and you can access all of the
sculpting tools in one.
The first tool we want to have look at is move tool. Because
usually you will start by creating primitive optic on screen and move it into
position, move the corner move the rough form into whatever you want to create.
Some basic functions that you will constantly need to adjust is size
of the brush and bias. The bias means how sharp the bush will fall off to its
corner to its outer rim. Now you can adjust these parameters from the little
head of the display from the heart in the center of the screen which by the way
you can switch on and switch off by the button in the upper left corner but I
think using the right mouse button to increase or decrease the size of the
brush is much more convenient. And if you hold down the ctrl key on the
keyboard and use the right mouse button you can adjust the bias. Again the bias
is for the sharpness or strength of the fall off of the brush. Now you can see
me playing around with the settings brush size as well as bias and you can
watch what settings are doing to my test scene on the screen. But you should
play around with the settings just like in Photoshop you are using your stylus
to draw anything you have to find your own settings for brush size and bias
especially for pressure sensitivity to which we will come later.
Now in the lower right hand part of the screen you can see some
optical representation of the brush. The first is the brush seen from the buff
circle the sharper the circle is the higher the biases. Second part is the
brush seen from the side something to say about that just for moment and you
can see how soft how round the edges will be created. The height of the brush
or let’s say how much geometry you are actually editing depends either on the
pressure you are applying or on the offset value. The offset actually means how
deep the brush will penetrate into the mesh or how much of the data downwards
from the brush will be effected.
So the height in this lower right hand part or lower right hand
display actually was to the offset. You can adjust offset from the heart or
from the head of the display or you can use the middle mouse button to adjust
the offset and Modo will display some yellow line showing how deep the brush
will actually penetrate. Now for me the offset setting by the middle mouse
button often stops. I don’t know why I’ve to use the heart from time to time to
adjust the offset. It should also be noted that the offset value only makes
sense when you are in adaptive or relative sculpting mode not in absolute mode.
I will talk about that later. Function you will use quite often to smooth out
whatever you have done to even out the geometry. You can access the smooth
brush by holding down the shift key and just left mouse button pen clicking on
whatever you want to adjust. You can actually put the smooth function on other
qualifiers I will show you how that works in a moment but in general you will
have it on the shift key and just smooth out any something you should keep in
mind is the brush size.
The brush size is relative to the screen. That means if you zoom
in on the mesh the brush will actually effect less geometry if you zoom out it
will effect more geometry. It will always effect what you have seen in the red
circle of the brush. So keep that in mind when you are trying to adjust very
small parts of your geometry and zoom out because suddenly your brush will get
much more effective. Let me clean up some of the mess on the mesh that I made
here to show you the basic brush types that are available. I think in most
cases you will use the brush with the soft edge because by just clinking up the
bias you actually get a brush with harder edge but if you want to you can
directly use harder edge brush. You can use procedural or spherical brushes for
somewhat sophisticated functions that is another story we will tell another
time.
Related stuffing has an image brush actually loaded in an image
alia so let me just show you this little life rescale and rotation tool that is
the second button just right to the image button. If you use both buttons at
the same time you can use the image button rotated and rescaled on the fly. And
the last brush type here is just a normal text brush you can type nearly any
text you want and just stump it on your mesh or use it as mask and again that
is another story and shall be told another time.
If I recap what we learned about move tool then I would say use
the move tool to get the first basic rough shape of your mesh into form and use
the right mouse button to adjust the brush size you are dealing with and use
ctrl and right mouse button to adjust the bias or sharpness of the brush. You can
use middle mouse button or offset slider on the heart to increase or decrease
offset and the offset defines how much geometry is effected by a brush. The last
but not least use the shift key to smooth whatever you’ve did.
So let’s move onto the push tool. For me the push tool is the most
powerful sculpting brush in Modo. Even prefer to scoff and coff and whatever
but those are different stories we shall be told another time. The only thing
we really can’t do with push tool is moving geometry but then again Modo has a
move tool for that. Now the push tool if you activated will just push in or
pull out geometry wherever you press it on the mesh. Just like with the move
tool you can adjust the brush size with the right mouse button and bias or
sharpness of the brush with ctrl and right mouse button. By the way pushing or
pulling if you just press down then you are pushing the geometry because the
tool is called push tool. If you hold down the ctrl key then you are pulling
along the normal and we will talk about normal mode in a moment also you can
use the offset to define how deep or how far the brush will penetrate into the
mesh or pull the geometry out of the mesh. The push tool is good way of showing
the difference between adaptive and absolute offset mode. In Adaptive mode
which is standard mode the pressure you’ve applied to the pen will be transhot
into some relative pressure on the screen and the presented you type with just
middle mouse button for the offset defines if it’s strengthening your pressure
or its weakening your pressure and how the pressure will be calculated. Push into
the mesh or how far the brush will pull out geometry from your mesh. And you
can type in any arbitrary measurement meters inches defining the maximum value
that the brush will effect. Understanding how the normal mode works is
important to get full control over what your brush is doing to the geometry. The
standard mode is average. Average just means that all the normal of the geometry
underneath your brush will be taking into consideration. And when you press or
pull on the geometry the action will take along this average normal. So as you
can see on the screen average actually follows the contour of the mesh I am
working on. But if you want to create some concave structure very sharp edge
average won’t help anyway. So If you switch to let’s say screen the normal
along which the geometry will be modified is taken from your actual screen
rotation. So actually you brush will push or pull straight forward from where
you look at and that is a very great way of sharply defining where the geometry
is pushed to.
And having understood that the other modes are quite easy to
understand this as well. Brush center of course uses normal underneath the
brush center vertex uses the normal of the every vertex you are running over. Mouse
down is little bit tricky to use because it uses the normal when you start the
stroke and carries that along while you pressing down.
Let us start about the density mode. But first let me clean up
the mesh once again shift key your friend. Density mode is attenuated that
means that if you run over the same area with one brush stroke without stopping
the stroke the limit up to which the geometry will be filled up or pushed or
pulled is defined by the percentage of your offset or by the offset value. But if
you switched to edit mode there is no limit you just keep on pushing or pulling
the geometry out or in depending on how option you run over the same area. Note
there is no geometry added you are just moving vertices up or down. The other
two modes take their limits from the maximum offset amount you have to define
just as if you pressed with maximum pressure or from the maximum value in the
displacement map. Now the displacement map comes into play when you are using
subdivision or multiresolution sculpting that is a different story and will be
told another time.
Let us have a look at a standard bush stroke. You can see all
those little bumps and those bumps are created because there is no continuous
transfer of positions of the pen to the editing on the screen. If I increase the
interpolation value then even less positions from my mouse or from my pen are
used to create editing blobs. In order to connect those blobs I can switch on the
continuous strokes and that will just join or connect those single steps those
single positions Modo asks from my pen. So it’s if you want to create a continuous
smooth stroke decrease the interpolation value and switch on continuous stroke.
That may slow down Modo on geometry with lot of polygons. Of course and there
may be times when you actually want to have a set of very straight lines where
you just increased the interpolation and switch on continuous strokes to get
some jaggy lines on your geometry. Now by switching on nozzle note all you get
all those additional controls down here. And that means you can control what
the pressure of your stylus is doing what the tilt of your pen is doing. The first
value interacts with your operating system’s sensitivity of your stylus. So I won’t
get into detail here. You have to just try it out because your operation system
will have its own setting for sensitivity. The strength will in most cases be best
set to pressure because the harder you press the deeper the brush will penetrate
into the geometry and by combining pressure and size and speed you can create calligraphy
like strokes on the screen which can be quite nice. The rotation function
allows you to align the normals of strokes making to the direction in which you
are moving. You have to actually try that out fair it to the heart.
Now let us move to the topic of multires subdivision sculpting. So
far I have been using non subdivided mesh and the main reason for that is that
you can see what the brush strokes are what the tools are actually doing to the
geometry. By simply switching on multires you are creating an invisible
displacement map in the background that Modo will use to edit subdivision surfaces
on your mesh and that will give you of course a lot smoother control over your sculpt
but you don’t have direct control over the polygons or the vertices you are
influencing and that is the reason why so far I am using a nonsubdivided mesh. You
can control subdivision level by pressing one of the two arrows up or down. You
can see the actual level in the multires display but I would always have an eye
on the polygon count on the lower right hand corner of the screen because the
multires level is some kind of abstract.
Finally let us have a look at the masking functions in the Modo
sculpting tools. If you want to use masking you have to use a multires mesh. It
doesn’t work with non subdivided non multires mesh. To activate the painting for
the mask by just clicking on the paint function and then you have the standard
mouse function with the right mouse button to adjust the brush size and the
bias and just paint on the mask. The mask you paint it will define what part of
the mesh is not influenced by your brush. If you want invert that behavior if
you want to adjust what you paint it on you’ve to invert the mask. So it’s
really easy to define what areas of the mesh you want to adjust and what to
not. And since the bias or the fall off at the b of the brush is respected you
get a smooth fall off smooth transition from the masked area to the non masked
area. But beware there is a situation I went into a couple of times so I am
able to give this little warning: sometimes if you clear the mask you’ve no
mask on the screen, you’ve nothing visible and you can’t adjust your mesh you
have no idea why that is. Have a look if you have invert mask active because
that will actually when everything masked off not adjustable. Just crack that and
you are good to go.
