I bulk up the base mesh a bit and then cut panels with draw sharp and stabilize stroke to get angular shapes. I try using the flatten brush but it keeps overlapping with the grooves.
I think the shapes here are mostly well defined but the grooves and panels look bumpy, like they’re moulded from clay rather than machined plating
What tools do you use for sci-fi armour plating?
Hello there…First of all blender’s sculpting brushes are not that great for hard surface sculpting, in fact is hard to get clean results as you would expect, however with proper technique and understanding of those tools and settings you should get close to something significantly good just like the work from zbrush artists (zbrush organic sculpting combined with polygon modelling its the most popular way to do it): so to give you some input on how hard surface sculpting works you should watch zbrush hard surface sculpting tutorials such as this ones, to understand the techniques and how to apply and mimic something similar in blender ZBRUSH TUTORIAL_ALL HARD SURFACE TECHNIQUES 1#(DETAIL) (youtube.com)
selwy.com » Hard Surface Sculpting
How to Create Clean Hardsurface in ZBrush (youtube.com)
How to Sculpt and Paint Hard Surface Characters (80.lv)
also check marco plouffe works he one of the best hard surface zbrush sculptors Zbrush Hard Surface Sculpting Tips – with Marco Plouffe - YouTube
Also there is paid courses and tutorials using zbrush as well in which you can learn from.
I hope that helps 
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thanks. It looks like zbrush has some brushes blender doesn’t. their polish brush sounds like it respects edges far better than blender’s flatten brush
This may also depend on what tip you find… or who you ask…
Even when “switching” or re-create from Z-brush to blender"
You may also look into:
