3D Design: Sculpting

Carveco Tutorial: Sculpting Tools in Maker Plus

In this tutorial, we explore the Sculpting Tools in Carveco Maker Plus, including Smooth and Erase tools. While these are simplified compared to the full sculpting suite in Carveco, they are powerful enough for enhancing, blending, and refining reliefs.

🔹 Smoothing Tool Overview

• Adjust Radius and Strength to control how much area and how strongly the smoothing applies.
• Use low strength for subtle adjustments and preserve details.
• Smoothness affects how rounded or sharp the tool behaves—100% is fully smooth, 0% keeps sharper transitions.
• Lazy Brush Distance helps smooth out your hand movements by offsetting the brush trail.

Tips for Using Smooth

• Use low strength to avoid flattening reliefs too much.
• Turn off the Zero Plane to see where unintended bulges or dips occur.
• Enable Material Safety Plane to prevent the tool from exceeding a depth threshold.
• Masking by color allows you to protect or isolate specific areas.

🔹 Erase Tool

• Set to Erase to Baseline under Behavior for proper function.
• Use with light strength to gently sculpt or remove fine details.
• Scatter Distance randomly offsets the brush for more organic textures.

🔹 Using Snapshots & Revert

• Click Snapshot to save a state of your sculpting session.
• Revert takes you back to the beginning of your session or to the last snapshot.
• Undo works step-by-step through each stroke.

🔹 Practical Applications

• Blend overlapping reliefs (e.g., scroll over Pegasus) by sculpting with clipart still in blue "floating" mode before pasting.
• Use Smooth for softening edges and Erase for carving back or shaping.
• Great for fine-tuning scrolls, flags, and banners for clean transitions.