Hi,
I’ve started looking into improving some of the masking in sculpt mode.
The first improvement is box select masking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtWzq7LZH5o
I’ve also made progress with smoothing the whole mask on the mesh but atm there are some code hurdles that I’m stuck with until I’ve had a dialog with the sculpt maintainer.
Other improments I would like to add are lasso masking and sharpen the mask.
Suggestions are welcome.
This would be most welcome!!!
Mmm selected the wrong tab, actually wanted to create this under Blender discussion. Don’t know if this really qualifies as an Blender announcement.
I second this. Extremely useful.
Add: I’m sure one of the mods would be willing to move it over if you ask.
Indeed very useful!
Does it select all the way through the mesh? Like can you box select an arm and it’ll mask off the entire arm or does it just mask the front faces?
Yes it selects through the whole mesh. There is no culling on it. Maybe that could be another thing to add?
Is it possible to add a button to do a universal sharpen or smooth ala zbrush?
Well for me at least, I was hoping it did select through for the reason I gave. I could see both being useful in different situations though.
Now we have to do so:
1 In “edit mode”, select those polygons that you want to cover with mask.
2 Hide unselected.
3 In “sculpt mode”, use “fill Mask”.
4 Use “Unhide All”.
But with this method, we can not make automatic sharpness or blur mask, so I look forward to it.
I wouldn’t mind using vertex groups on the base mesh to hide or mask things, I think this could work for multires sculpting I don’t know about dynamic topology where edges are been split and merged dynamically.
I wouldn’t mind using vertex groups on the base mesh to hide or mask things, I think this could work for multires sculpting I don’t know about dynamic topology where edges are been split and merged dynamically.
This is under dynamic topology + mask. It works but topology isn’t great. A better workaround can be: use a brush to just make the area denser, exit dyntopo, mask and displace-sculpt. Turn On dyntopo and continue sculpting.
@michalis thanks but what I wanted to do is a little different or maybe I am not understanding what you are saying 100%. I was working on a set of teeth recently and because the are so close together it becomes a chore to paint masks or to draw selection box with “H-key” but I thought if you could group your base mesh (multi-res)into vertex groups than no matter where you were with sculpting you could always hide or mask things using those predefined vertex groups.
I do not know if you can do, but for me it would be very useful. It would be also interesting to be able to alt + click on the icon to make all hidden or masked groups except the one selected. Sorry for my bad English: D
@tyrant
I see, you can’t vertex group under dynamic topology. Never during remesh operations. You can’t group under zbrush-dynamesh either. You might, but if you remesh it again all groups will be altered. Same under dyntopo. You can turn off Dyntopo and mask.
Under multires, I agree, it’s great to have a grouping tool. We may have something… Edit mode. Haven’t try it.
After all, multires modifier is full of issues. you know my opinion on this.
When it comes to masks in Blender one thing is just surprising me - that mask is not visible with matcap on. Whoever can fix this will be my personal hero 
Run into some hurdles with lasso select… So I thought I would look at the matcap issues… Matcap really doesn’t have a good performance and I think I’ve found the issue. It’s using immediate mode and not VBO’s. Going to see if I can make a hack which allows it to use the super fast drawing code!
Everybody would like to have mask modifier supported by sculpt mode.
Wow! mask over Matcap!
Great progress, ikee!
@tyrant monkey vertex groups imitating zbrush polygoroups would be great 
@ikee - you can see an example here:
