In this very short basic tutorial on sculpting in Blender, I’ll show you two very useful operations for working with Face Sets: Initialize By Loose Parts and Auto-Masking.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this very short basic tutorial on sculpting in Blender, I’ll show you two very useful operations for working with Face Sets: Initialize By Loose Parts and Auto-Masking.
By Loose Parts is one of the options available in the Face Sets Initialize menu, and it allows you to automatically create one Face Set for each of the geometric islands of an object. By geometric islands, I mean the parts of a single Object that are physically separate from each other. In Edit Mode, specifically in Vertex selection mode, a Loose Part can be selected by hovering over a vertex and pressing the L key.
In the case of the 3D model I’m using for this example, there are three geometric islands or Loose Parts: the wick, the candle, and the base.
If I enter Sculpt Mode and choose the Initialize By Loose Parts option from the Face Sets menu, Blender creates exactly three Face Sets: one for each geometric island of the same Object.
Blender might keep the default gray color for one of the Face Sets. You can randomize the colors of the various Face Sets using Randomize Colors from the Face Sets menu.
However, when using a brush on the object, I’ll still affect all the geometry, even if they belong to different Face Sets.
To affect only the elements of the Face Set I click on, I need to enable the Face Sets option from the Auto Masking menu. This menu has a fairly plain appearance and is located in the center of the 3D Viewport header.
Now, if I click and drag on the candle, I’ll modify its geometry. But if I move the mouse over parts that belong to other Face Sets, no changes will be applied. The same thing happens, of course, if I click on one Face Set and, while holding the left mouse button, drag over the geometry of another Face Set.
Alright, that’s it for this very short video tutorial! I hope you found it useful. See you soon!