I’m new to sculpting in general and I regularly come across situations where I’d like to have better control over the edge shapes of thin objects.
I got this shape from a extract and I’d l to be able to flatten or curl down the areas where it’s curled up.
I’ve tried using the move tool (the worst way), flatten/clay build up with BackfaceMask turned on, as well as some additional highly questionable methods using masking.
Is there a clean technique that can solve this?
Hello @ericxyun
A general tip–lower resolution meshes are more resistant to surface distortion. The more points on a mesh surface, the more easily it will pick up localized distortion. So for the smoothest results, you may have an easier time generating the extract at lower poly, or using ZRemesher to reduce the polycount as far as possible. It will then be easier to push/pull individual points around to adjust the general shape without distorting the mesh. It can then be subdivided upward again to smooth the geometry once the low poly is adjusted. Dynamic Subdivision can be enabled to preview how the mesh will look when subdivision smoothing is applied. Don’t forget to crease the edges you wish to stay hard edged when being subdivided.
Another neat trick Dynamic Subdivision has is the ability to work on a 2D mesh with no thickness, and generate a virtual thickness for it with the “Thickness” slider that can then be converted to real geometry. You then only have to worry about moving the points on a single surface on a piece of low poly geometry, without deforming the adjacent surface. So you could either create the extract with no thickness, or delete all but a single surface.Then the virtual thickness can be converted to a uniform extrusion of real geometry. Again this is going to work the best on lower poly meshes.
For a mesh that is higher resolution and already has thickness, you could also try using one of the Gizmo Deformers to create a control cage to reshape the mesh without the kind of distortion that happens from trying to shape it by hand.
