Hey guys I’ve just had a first look at 2.5 sculpt and its looking very good.
However I cant find two things. You used to be able to select an area to work on -using shift control i think. And where is the add clay idea that was taken from sculptris?
Neither are in trunk. Unlimited clay was just a proof of concept (I think), and the occlude area, whatever it was called isn’t in 2.5x
Alt+B works pretty nicely if you want to sculpt an area, like the inside of a leg for example.
Wow thats really disappointing, and in fact taking out the control shift function seems like a really retrograde step.
Alt B as I understand doesn’t work in the same way as control shft. It certainly doesn’t accelerate the scultp tool as much.
I suppose I’ll have to stick to 2.49 for sculpting 
The sculpting should be much faster in 2.53, regardless of whether or not the mesh is partially hidden.
Have you tried turning on VBO’s, setting the draw method to something other than automatic and tried in OpenGL mode (no matcaps etc)?
EDIT: Alt+B isn’t very good for sculpting faces which are extremley close, or near touching, but from my experience if there is a big enough distance (0.5-1BU) it works pretty well, the brush will only effect the faces visible.
I must say that sculpting is a big improvement (I’ve also tried the jwilkings branch) but for some reason I don’t get the same results like with Sculptris. With the last one everything feels so natural.
It is frustrating that I really can pin point where the differences is (is that the unlimited clay thing, I dunno) because I want to give some constructive criticism instead of program X feels better then Y.
isn’t unhiding and hiding in Nicholas branch for the GSOC projects, I have never used that branch but it could be worth checking…Let me go do just that
I’m not sure, I think it may be, I know Masking is in there though, which will solve a lot of problems!
Also, I think the difference between applications are usually minor tweaks to the settings, the only thing you can really do is to test, test, test.
not really sure about 2.5. don’t use it very much but, in 2.49 alt +b and shift control click are to different things. Alt + b will hide your mesh, but NOT prevent/protect hidden parts from tool commands/sculpting. I usually make vertex groups and use the mask modifier, which WILL protect the hidden parts, from area of influence from sculpt brush.
just came from testing it. Nicholas builds are the ones to get if you want mesh hiding ctrl+shift+LMB worked this is on a linux build with revision number 31457. I don’t think any of these changes are in trunk yet.
Thanks TM, I’m assuming that at some point these will make it into the trunk at some point.