Having difficulties with scuplting

Question

If the title or username doesn't say it already, I am totally new to this sort of thing. I recently came across blender guru and decided, let's give it a bash.

I am having quite a lot of fun however, I have come across a rather two frustrating problems.

1. Within his video, he has a nice "copper" finish on his donut that allows him to see the depth of indentations quite easily. I tried to achieve the same thing but mine is darker and I really struggle to see or gauge the depth of my indentations.

YouTube video for reference: https://youtu.be/6OTX3ZdYvEA?t=212

Blender Guru's View:

My View:

As you can see mine is dull and makes it really difficult for me to judge depth... am I doing something wrong?

2. In Blender Guru's video, he creates an indentation on the perimeter of the donut using the sculpting brush and it works perfectly on his video.

YouTube video for reference: https://youtu.be/6OTX3ZdYvEA?t=350

Blender Guru's Video:

My Attempt:

My brush seems to be affecting more surface area than his brush. I have my brush set to the same settings found in his video:

• Sculpt Tool: Draw Brush
• Radius: 115px
• Strength: 0.263

I have tried different settings, higher strengths but it really messes up the donut. One observation that I did make is that his tool cursor appears to be very different to mine... does that have anything to do with it?

If anyone could help an absolute noob out I would forever be in your debt... busy pulling my hair out here.

Answer 1

In Sculpt Mode, Blender uses a 'matcap', one of which is this reddish clay material that lets you judge the surface of your sculptures better. The matcap Blender Guru uses appears to be the default sculpting matcap of his version, so if you're using a newer version, chances are you're stuck with the current default until you can find the matcap somewhere online. If you do manage to procure the desired matcap, you'll need to install it, by going to Edit > Preferences > Lights > MatCaps > Install.

You can change the matcap in the Viewport Shading menu, so even if you can't find the desired matcap, you can always use another built in one, because Blender has quite a large choice!

I also noticed that the icing object seems to be a lot darker than your donut object, and this is because you have Fade Inactive Geometry enabled in the Overlays menu. To disable it, just click once on the checkbox or bring the slider to zero.

Finally, the most likely reason why your sculpting seems to affect a larger area, despite having the same settings as Blender Guru's, is that the unit of pixels is not absolute; depending on how close you are to the object, the area affected changes. You seem to be zoomed out further than the tutorial, which is why you seem to be sculpting a larger area.

If you want the brush size to remain absolute, then you can change the Radius Unit by going to Brush > Radius Unit > Scene. This will make the Radius Unit the current Scene Unit (which is m by default).