I’m attempting to sculpt fur in layers like the example above, however, I’m having a difficult time figuring out the best solution. I originally created a custom masking brush using an alpha I randomly selected, set up my multiresolution modifier, and using area plane, anchored & stencil, and constant, brushed on the alpha, but doing so masks the original topology, like so:
I’m not 100% sure how else to achieve the above example other than lengthy, tedious methods; there doesn’t NEED to be an exceeding amount of detail but some variation and definition at the very least.
The mesh being masked (or outside the stencil, the mesh being drawn on) seems to only happen with the texture set to stencil and the stroke being either anchored or drag dot. Not sure why, but airbrush and dots were both fine if you want to carefully place the stencil each time. I’ve previously used the texture to the area plane and a drag dot stroke to get it placed specific places and rotations quickly. (I will assume you got your multires set up well; the blend file you shared doesn’t have one active on the cowl object.)
For more of your reference’s overlapping details–I haven’t personally used VDM brushes (just haven’t had to sculpt something with a lot of repeated detail since they were added to Blender)–but there’s an add-on for easily sculpting and exporting your own fur tufts (so you’ll know exactly what it looks like rather than a randomly selected alpha that I suppose could have those lines built in): https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/baking/vdm_brush_baker.html
And plenty of tutorials if you look them up for how to use VDMs; they incorporate color to allow more precise shapes, similar to the difference between normals and height maps.
Hm. I was expecting them to stick out a lot more (akin to the teeth, spines, etc I’ve seen people using in Blender) so you could then sculpt on the “skin” below the previous row of tufts. But I’m not immediately mastering vdm baking to prove or disprove that they can do overlap as they do in Zbrush.
If alphas/textures aren’t working out for you, to get a nice base to sculpt from you could try treating it like a stylized hairdo and set up curves and bevel shapes before converting to a mesh and remeshing to merge the bases down to one object:
(And if that’s too intense because you’re aiming for something more game-ready or something, you could also do the same with hair cards, especially just along the edges and key silhouette areas on top of a tiling texture that you could just paint flat and get your UVs laid out on like a trim sheet.)
