Sculpting in Blender 4.3: What's New & How to Get Started

>> The new sculpting tools in
Blender 4.3 are looking really good.

So I'm going to quickly take you through
some of the changes with a quick start guide.

So in Blender 4.3, I've got
my default cube selected.

I'm going to go across to
the sculpting workspace.

You can see my screencast
keys down the corner here.

And instantly, you'll see the
interface has changed slightly

with our brushes now along the bottom here,
instead of along the left-hand side here.

If you're completely new
to sculpting in Blender,

you'll find that you won't be
able to sculpt on your cube.

That's because it hasn't got
enough topology or faces.

Sculpting will only affect the vertices.

So I can sculpt on this bit here,
and you can see it just about moving.

We need to add vertices to this.

The simplest way to do that
is using the re-mesh option

at the top here, and that's in the same place.

And under this menu, the
two things you need to know

about are voxel size and
the re-mesh button there.

And both those have keyboard shortcuts.

If you press R, you'll get the voxel size,
and it's much easier to see it like this.

You can see the size of the
faces that I'm going to create.

And I'll go down to something
like 0.04 and left click.

So that set the voxel size.

And you can see up here,
we're roughly around 0.04.

And the re-mesh button, the
shortcut for that is Ctrl R.

So you can see it's slightly changed there.

And if I start drawing now,
you can see those faces there.

So R to set the face or voxel size
and Ctrl R to actually do the re-mesh.

You've got your radius and strength up here.

You can change those with F for
radius and Shift F for strength.

You've also got your brush
settings down the side here

under the active tool and workspace settings.

You've also got your symmetry
options at the top here,

and you can enable your symmetry
for symmetrical objects.

So for anybody new to sculpting,
that is the quick start guide.

And you can now have a play with the brushes,
which are all listed along the bottom.

And that, of course, is the big change.

All your brushes are down the bottom here,
and these brushes are actually assets.

There's a big advantage to this, and
that's that you can import brushes.

So if you've seen a wonderful
brush pack somewhere,

you can download those and import them.

And you can create your own and
save them into this asset shelf.

There are a few new brushes.

I won't go over those.

I'll save that for another video.

But you can use your scroll wheel to wheel
through the menu here, or you can expand this

out and make it bigger, and you can change
the size or the display settings just here.

I think something like 32 works well.

You can, of course, include the names if you
haven't got an oversized interface like I have.

So I'll hide those for the moment.

And you can choose to hide
or show certain groups.

So the paint brushes, for example,
could be here, simulation brushes,

all those sort of cloth things and so forth.

Add and subtract.

And then the general has the
extra push and pull ones as well.

I'll keep that on all for now.

On the very side here, you have
the actual asset library tools.

So you can find different brushes
from different libraries and so forth.

See my video on asset libraries
for more information on that.

That's only something you have to worry
about if you're actually importing brushes.

If you create a new brush for
yourself, you can save it here

and it will always appear
when you open up Blender.

So let's do exactly that.

Generally speaking, you'll probably always
use the draw brush to create new brushes from.

So I'll right-click on that.

And we've got an option of duplicate asset.

We can give this a name.

I'll call this rock brush.

And you can see it's going to
save it to my user library.

So I can press save.

And you can see I've now got the draw
brush here and my rock brush here.

So on this rock brush, if I make some
changes, let's say add a texture to this.

So under the texture, I'll click new.

Unfortunately, we can't change
the texture in here.

We have to go to the texture properties
here and then open up an image.

So I'll press open here.

Go across to my brush folder and
choose one of my rock brushes

that I've downloaded from somewhere.

Let's take rock seven here.

Open that up.

And then I can start drawing with this.

And you can see it's not doing
a great job at the moment.

I'd probably want to go back
to my brush settings.

And you can see the texture pop in there.

I'll minimize that.

And under the stroke method, I can
change this to something like anchored

and it comes out with this texture here.

However, it's not looking great.

So I'll add a few more faces by pressing R for
the re-mesh, bringing this down to something

like 0.01 around there, and CTRL R to re-mesh.

You can see now, I've got some more detail.

Let's bring out that rock brush.

And now, I can paint with
this lovely rock texture.

I can right-click on this.

I can add it to my quick favorites or
give it a special keyboard shortcut.

Let's try that.

I'll click that, and let's press Q, for example.

So let's go to a different
brush, like the blob brush here.

When I press Q, you can see it
selects my rock brush just there.

The other great thing is
that I can press file, new.

And this time, I'll open up a sculpting file.

I won't save any of the changes.

And even though I haven't saved any
changes, if I come down to here,

you can see there's my rock brush.

And amazingly, it has the texture
still there, and I can click and drag

to add my rock texture to my sphere.

I'll undo that, though.

Press R, bring my voxels down.

CTRL R to do the re-mesh.

And then let's bring out
some lovely rocks again.

That's amazing, isn't it?

So hopefully, you can see how this
asset shelf for our brushes is going

to make things a lot easier within
Blender's sculpting workspace.

And keep an eye out on this channel for more
videos about the individual brushes themselves.

If you've got any questions,
then do comment below,

and check the description for any updates.

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.