Creating advanced masks with Sculpt Expand

Sometimes, it's important to limit the surface area that can be affected by our brushes. One way to achieve this is through the use of Masks. We learned a little bit about this in the Using masks to add the ears and neck section of Chapter 3, Sculpting a Simple Character Head with Basic Brushes.

The latest version of Blender includes some very powerful new ways of creating masks. In particular, we're going to look at the Sculpt Expand operator to create a repeating gradient pattern.

Getting ready

Nature is full of interesting patterns that can be difficult to sculpt by hand. A wonderful example of this is the underside of a gecko's foot, which can be seen in this incredible photograph by Matt Reinbold:

Figure 6.38 – The lamellae of a gecko's foot (photo by Matt Reinbold)

There are so many intricate details here! We're going to take a stylized approach to recreating this detail...