Polygroups Explained: What They Are and When to Use Them

Polygroups are the least glamorous feature in digital sculpting and one of the most useful. They don't move a single vertex. What they do is decide, once, where the parts of your model begin and end, so every later job (hiding the arm to reach the torso, masking a belt, cutting armor into plates) starts with one click instead of a careful brush pass.

What are polygroups in 3D sculpting?

Polygroups are named regions of one mesh, each shown in its own color, that you can hide, isolate, mask or split with a click. ZBrush and Nomad Sculpt have them, Blender's version is called Face Sets, and Re:Form's is called Mesh Sets. They save with the file, so a boundary you draw once stays available for the rest of the project.

Maxon's ZBrush documentation puts the distinction well as of September 2026: PolyGroups "only create separate selection areas," while SubTools create separate pieces of geometry. That's the whole idea. The surface stays one continuous mesh; the groups are labels on top of it.

It helps to set polygroups next to the two things they're most often confused with:

A mask answers "what should the next operation affect?" A polygroup answers "what are the parts of this model?" You'll convert between them constantly, and that's the point: a group is a mask you never have to paint twice.

Why use polygroups instead of just masking?

Polygroups beat masks when you'll need the same boundary more than once. A mask is usually painted, used and cleared; a polygroup keeps the boundary with the file. In Re:Form, ZBrush, Blender and Nomad Sculpt, a group turns back into an exact, hard-edged mask in one click, so you reuse the boundary instead of repainting it.

Three situations make the difference obvious:

• Hard-surface work. An armor plate, a helmet visor, a gun stock. The edges are decided by design, not by feel, and you'll mask, hide and polish each part many times.
• Dense or cluttered models. Reaching the inside of a mouth, the torso under a crossed arm, or the far side of a cloak is much easier when the thing in the way is one click from hidden.
• Imported models. A kitbash or a scan often arrives as one object that is really six parts. Grouping it by loose part or by crease angle hands you those parts back.

If you're newer to the mask side of this, our guide to masking in 3D sculpting covers painting, filtering and inverting masks, and why blur-before-sculpt, sharpen-before-cut is the rule to learn first.

Ways to create polygroups

Every tool offers roughly the same five routes. Which one you reach for depends on where the boundary comes from.

From a mask. Paint or draw a mask, then convert it. This is the manual, precise route and the one you'll use most on organic models: mask the hairline, make it a group, and it's there tomorrow.

By loose part. Every disconnected piece of the mesh gets its own group. Ideal for imports and for anything built from separate primitives. One click, and it never guesses wrong, because connectivity isn't a judgement call.

By angle (normals). The surface splits wherever the angle between neighboring faces is sharper than a threshold. A cube becomes six groups; a sphere stays one. This is the hard-surface workhorse, since flat caps, bevels and clipped faces fall out as their own groups automatically.

By paint color or material. Paint regions roughly with vertex color, then group by color. It's a nice way to lay out a character's zones (skin, cloth, leather, metal) in a single pass with a big brush.

From visible geometry. Hide everything you don't want, then group what's left. Useful when isolation was the easy way to get to the selection in the first place.

How do polygroups work in ZBrush, Blender and Nomad Sculpt?

ZBrush PolyGroups, Blender Face Sets and Nomad Sculpt facegroups all do the same job: color-coded regions you hide, isolate and mask in a click. The differences sit at the edges. ZBrush has the deepest set of creation options, Blender offers the most boundary types, and Nomad is built around tapping on a touch screen.

All details below were checked against each tool's official documentation as of September 2026.

ZBrush PolyGroups

ZBrush's Tool > Polygroups menu lists Auto Groups (by connectivity), Group Visible, Group by Normals with a Max Angle setting, From Masking, and groups from polypaint and UVs. To isolate a group, Ctrl+Shift-click it; Ctrl+Shift-click empty canvas to show everything again. Maxon's docs also list the uses that make PolyGroups central to ZBrush: one-click masking, ZRemesher respecting group borders during retopology, Panel Loops for hard-surface panels, and Insert Mesh brushes. PolyGroups are the oldest and most thoroughly connected version of the idea.

Blender Face Sets

In Sculpt Mode, Blender's Face Sets menu (with a pie menu on Alt-W) offers Face Set from Masked, from Visible and from Edit Mode Selection. Initialize Face Sets builds them all at once By Loose Parts, By Materials, By Normals, By UV Seams, By Edge Creases, By Bevel Weight or By Sharp Edges, per the Blender 5.2 LTS manual. H hides the face set under the cursor and Shift-H isolates it. You can also paint them with the Draw Face Sets brush and grow them with Face Set Expand. The manual notes auto-masking is "especially useful in combination with face sets," which means a brush can be limited to the group you start the stroke on. That group-aware brushing is a real strength of Blender's version.

Nomad Sculpt facegroups

Nomad Sculpt's Facegroup tool lets you paint groups directly. With "+ Face Group" enabled, every new stroke starts a new group. Tapping a facegroup hides it, Split moves the hidden part into a new object, and with the Mask tool's facegroup button on, tapping a group masks it. Groups show as patches you can rename, recolor or delete. It's a tidy system designed for tablets, which is where Nomad works best.

Mesh Sets in Re:Form

Re:Form is our tool, so read this section with that in mind. Mesh Sets arrived in Re:Form 0.8.0 Alpha and live in the Topology section of the panel. They're on the Free plan like everything else in the toolset.

Making groups. From mask turns the masked area (anything over half strength) into a new group; mask another area and press it again to build up as many as you need. Auto gives every loose part its own group. By angle splits the surface at creases sharper than an Angle slider (5 to 120 degrees, 30 by default), and specks smaller than a few dozen triangles join their neighbor, so a rough surface doesn't shatter into hundreds of groups. By colour makes one group per painted color, with close shades falling together.

Seeing them. Show tints the model by group in every shading mode (Matcap, Unlit and Lit, wireframe included), with a quad-style grid over the surface so groups read clearly. That grid is a display aid, not the mesh's real topology. The Groups button on the options bar is the same switch. Renders, turntables and timelapses never show the tint.

Using them. Mask group masks exactly the group you click; Shift-click adds a group to the current mask, Ctrl-click takes one out. The Group Mask brush does the same on every click without arming the button first. The Group Hide brush hides a group, and a hidden group is out of reach as well as out of sight: no brush, smoothing, grab or paint touches it, and the cursor won't land on it, so you can sculpt what's behind. A Clip cut and the mask shapes leave hidden groups alone too.

Turning groups into parts. Split groups in the Layers section makes every group its own layer, cut along the group borders. Panel Loops with Panels from: Groups builds one thickened panel per group. And Mask group followed by Split masked separates a single group into its own layer in two clicks.

What carries over. Groups follow the layer through Subdivide and Remesh-then-Subdivide, save with the project and come back with Undo. Each group operation is one undo step.

What Re:Form doesn't have yet: brushes that confine themselves to the group you start a stroke on, the way Blender's face set auto-masking does, or anything like ZRemesher following group borders. An Extract, Panel Loops or Split result also starts without groups, so you regroup the new piece if you need to. Re:Form is in alpha, and ZBrush and Blender have had years to connect groups to everything else in their toolsets.

A hard-surface workflow with polygroups

Here's the pattern that shows off what groups are for, using a helmet as the example. It works the same way in any of the four tools; the button names below are Re:Form's.

1. Block the shape and cut it. Sculpt the dome, then clip the visor opening and a flat brow line. Those cuts leave hard creases.
2. Group by angle. Run By angle at the default 30 degrees. The dome, the brow plane and the visor rim come out as separate groups. If a soft bend splits when it shouldn't, raise the angle; if a real edge merges, lower it.
3. Fix the stragglers by hand. Mask anything the angle pass missed and press From mask. Two minutes of cleanup beats an hour of repainting later.
4. Hide to reach. Hide the dome and polish the visor rim without catching the dome with a stray stroke.
5. Make parts. Split groups to put each region on its own layer, or run Panel Loops from groups for gapped, bevelled plates.

The same idea scales down to organic work. On a character, group the head, hands and clothing early, even roughly. You'll hide the hands to reach the belt and mask the head to inflate the torso dozens of times before the model is done.

Common polygroup mistakes

Grouping too early on a lumpy surface. An angle-based pass on a noisy blockout finds creases that aren't there. Smooth first, then group. If a surface looks bumpy where it shouldn't, why your sculpt looks lumpy walks through the usual causes.

Using the angle threshold as the only tool. Angle grouping is great at mechanical edges and useless at design edges that run across a smooth surface, like a seam line on a sleeve. Those come from a mask.

Forgetting that remeshing changes the mesh underneath. Groups are stored on the mesh's faces or vertices, so an operation that rebuilds the mesh has to carry them across or drop them. Tools differ here. In Re:Form they follow Subdivide and Remesh-then-Subdivide; results of Extract, Panel Loops and Split start ungrouped. Check before you rely on it. The trade-offs are covered in retopology vs remeshing.

Treating groups as separate objects. A group is still one surface. If you need to move a part freely, pose it, or export it alone, split it into its own layer or SubTool. Sculpt layers explained covers when a part deserves its own layer.

Should you learn polygroups as a beginner?

Yes, but not first. Learn the core brushes, then masking, then polygroups, in that order. A beginner in Re:Form, ZBrush, Blender or Nomad Sculpt gets the most from two operations: grouping by loose part after an import, and hiding a group to reach what's behind it. Both take seconds and pay off on the first real model.

The detailed routes (angle thresholds, color grouping, panels from groups) matter once you start hard-surface work or characters with gear. There's no rush. If you're still building your fundamentals, sculpting brushes explained is a better next read.

To try any of this without installing anything, open Re:Form in your browser. The Free plan has the full toolset, Mesh Sets included, up to roughly 12.5 million triangles, with OBJ import and export, no watermark on your models and no card. It needs a free sign-in and a desktop browser with WebGPU: current Chrome, Edge and Firefox, plus Safari 26 on macOS Tahoe. Pro ($9.99/month or $99/year, detailed on the Re:Form pricing page) raises the ceiling to 80 million triangles, adds STL, GLB and FBX, and includes a commercial license. The FAQ covers what alpha means day to day.

FAQ

Are polygroups the same as Blender face sets?

For practical purposes, yes. ZBrush PolyGroups, Blender Face Sets, Nomad Sculpt facegroups and Re:Form Mesh Sets all label regions of one mesh so you can hide, isolate and mask them quickly, and all save with the file. The differences are in creation options and in which other tools read them, such as ZBrush's ZRemesher or Blender's face set auto-masking.

Do polygroups affect the exported model?

Usually not in a way that matters downstream. Polygroups are editing metadata, not geometry, so an exported OBJ or STL is shaped the same with or without them. Some formats can carry group names, but slicers and game engines generally ignore them. If you need the parts to stay separate after export, split the groups into their own layers or objects first.

What angle should I use to group by normals?

Start at 30 degrees, Re:Form's default, and adjust from what you see. Lower values split gentler bends into separate groups; higher values keep more of the surface together and only break at sharp edges. Mechanical parts with crisp bevels group cleanly at 30 to 45 degrees. Smooth organic forms mostly stay as one group at any setting.