These are the brushes and tools that appear in the viewport once you select an interactive node such as Sculpt Mesh. They are not settings you dial in ahead of time and run once - you work with them live, dragging and stamping in the viewport, and nothing is written back to the graph until you press Accept.
Where the tools live
A sculpting node's UI is spread across four places:
| Surface | What you will find there |
|---|---|
| Tool tower | The column of icon buttons down the side of the viewport, one per tool the selected node offers. Click a button to activate that tool; drag one out to reassign it to a radial-menu wedge. |
| Viewport pills | The row of buttons across the top of the viewport - Brush, Material, Indicator, Symmetry, Pressure, Alpha. Each opens the settings shared by every brush, regardless of which one is active. |
| Floating panel | A draggable, collapsible panel inside the viewport, titled with the active tool's own name. It holds that tool's own settings and action buttons, and snaps to the nearest viewport edge, remembering its position and expanded state per tool. Tools that have nothing of their own to configure - Move, Sculpt, Inflate, Pinch, Plane, Flatten, Clay, Scrape and Fill - do not show one at all; their only knobs are the shared viewport pills above. |
| Details panel | The docked Details tab carries the chrome shared by every tool on the node: the Sculpt Layers stack, the Masking settings, and the Sections list. |
Accept commits
Accept and Cancel sit bottom-centre of the viewport while any tool is active.
- Accept - "Apply the active tool's pending changes and propagate the result to the node's output pin(s)." This is the only thing that writes your strokes to the node's output.
- Cancel - "Discard the active tool's pending changes and exit the tool without writing to the node's output pin(s)."
Nothing you do with a brush is visible outside the node until you press Accept.
Sculpting needs a real GPU. Every sculpt tool runs as a compute shader, and there is no CPU fallback: on a device that does not report Shader Model 5 (DirectX 11) or newer, sculpting refuses to run rather than running slowly.
In this section
- The Brushes - every tool in the tower, what it does to the mesh, and its default shortcut.
- Brush Settings - the Size, Stroke and Advanced settings shared by every brush, plus falloff, Indicator and Material.
- Symmetry - mirroring strokes across an axis, and why the origin follows the mesh.
- Masking and Selection - painting, marqueeing and filtering which vertices a brush is allowed to reach.
- Stamps, Alphas and VDM - texture stamps, the brush library on disk, and vector displacement maps.
- Sculpt Layers - the stack every stroke records into, and why sculpting starts out blocked.
- Sculpting Shortcuts - mouse gestures, keyboard defaults, undo, and the on-screen hints.