Open any sculpting app and you get a wall of brush icons with names like Trim Dynamic, Clay Ribbon, and Draw Sharp, and almost no explanation of which one you actually want. This is that explanation. Disclosure up front: Re:Form is our tool and it supplies the examples, but the brush concepts below are the same in ZBrush, Blender, and Nomad Sculpt — the names just shuffle.
What do 3D sculpting brushes actually do?
A 3D sculpting brush moves the vertices under your cursor according to one rule. Draw pushes them out along the surface normal, Flatten pulls them toward an averaged plane, Grab drags them with the mouse. Every brush is one of those rules plus a falloff shape. Learning the ten or so rules is the whole game — the rest is naming.
That framing matters because brush menus look like a list of features and are really a list of directions. Once you can name the direction a brush pushes in, you can predict what it will do to your mesh before you touch it, and the intimidating grid collapses into about five ideas.
The five families
Re:Form groups its brushes into five families, and the grouping generalizes well to other tools:
| Family | Brushes | What they have in common |
|---|---|---|
| Build | Draw, Draw Sharp, Carve, Clay, Clay Ribbon, Inflate, Crease, Fissure 01, Fissure 02, Pinch | Add or remove material — the ones that change volume |
| Surface | Smooth, Relax, Polish, Noise, Rake | Change the quality of a surface without changing the big form |
| Planes | Flatten, Fill, Scrape, Trim, Inset | Work against a computed plane to get hard, machined-looking surfaces |
| Utility | Grab, Mask | Move form wholesale, or protect it |
| Paint | Paint, Blend, Blur, Smear, Fill | Vertex color, not geometry |
That's 21 sculpting brushes plus a mask tool, and five more for vertex paint, in the current build (v0.6.4, and Re:Form is alpha software). Which sounds like a lot until you notice how many are variations on "raise the surface" tuned to a different sharpness.
Build brushes: adding and cutting form
These are the brushes that change volume — the digital equivalent of pressing clay on or scooping it off. In Re:Form each of them inverts when you hold Ctrl, so every build brush is really two brushes.
- Draw raises the surface along its normal. The default, the one you'll use most, and the one whose behavior everything else is described against.
- Draw Sharp raises a crisp, sharp-crested ridge instead of a soft swell. Ctrl carves it in. Reach for it when a Draw stroke reads as too mushy.
- Carve cuts a sharp gouge into the surface, and inverts to a raised ridge. This is your panel-line, scar, and cloth-seam brush.
- Clay builds up toward a raised surface plane rather than straight along the normal, which is why clay-type strokes stack into a mass instead of a lumpy trail.
- Clay Ribbon lays even ribbed slabs of clay — the same idea with a flatter, more deliberate footprint. Good for blocking muscle groups fast.
- Inflate pushes out along each vertex normal, so it puffs a region up from the inside. It's how you fatten a limb without redrawing it.
- Crease carves a sharp ridge or valley, pinching as it goes. Lips, eyelids, and the seam where two forms meet.
- Fissure 01 and Fissure 02 slice crack lines — 01 clean and smooth, 02 wandering and hand-drawn — and invert to raise a seam instead. Rock, bark, dried mud, damage.
- Pinch pulls the surface toward the cursor, tightening whatever is under the brush. It doesn't add material; it concentrates what's there. Run it along a soft edge to sharpen it.
If you only ever learned Draw, Clay, and Crease, you could block out and detail almost anything. The rest are speed.
What's the difference between the Draw and Clay brushes?
Draw pushes vertices outward along the surface normal, so a stroke follows every existing bump and inherits the surface's lumpiness. Clay builds toward an averaged plane instead, so overlapping strokes accumulate into a smooth mass. Use Draw for single deliberate marks, Clay for building volume over several passes.
In practice that means Clay is the blocking brush and Draw is the drawing brush. When beginners complain their sculpt looks like melted candle wax, it's usually Draw doing volume work it was never good at — the stroke amplifies the surface it lands on rather than resolving it. Switch to Clay for mass, keep Draw for the marks you want to see.
Surface brushes: changing quality, not shape
Surface brushes leave the big form alone and change what the skin of it feels like. They're the least glamorous family and the one that separates a finished sculpt from a rough one.
- Smooth relaxes each vertex toward the average of its neighbors. It's on Shift-drag as a held modifier in Re:Form, so you never have to switch to it — smooth mid-stroke and carry on.
- Relax evens out the topology — the triangle layout — with only a gentle touch to the shape. Use it when a region is stretched and ugly but the silhouette is right.
- Polish skims off surface noise while keeping the big forms. Where Smooth softens everything, Polish is closer to fine sandpaper.
- Noise sprinkles organic bump grain, and inverts to dent instead. Skin pores, stone, anything that needs to stop looking injection-molded.
- Rake drags combed tooth ridges along the stroke, and inverts to grooves. This is the traditional-sculpture look — the marks a toothed rake leaves in real clay — and it's very good at implying muscle fiber, hair mass, and wood.
Smooth and Relax are worth distinguishing carefully, because tools that only ship Smooth push people into destroying detail to fix mesh problems. Stretched geometry is a topology issue; smoothing it is treating the symptom. Relax first, then decide if you also need to remesh.
What do the plane brushes do?
Plane brushes compute an average plane from the surface under the cursor and move vertices toward it. Flatten levels everything to that plane, Fill raises only the valleys, Scrape shaves only the peaks, Trim planes high spots into flat facets, and Inset pushes the form inward while keeping it flat. They're how you get hard, manufactured-looking surfaces.
This family is what makes sculpting viable for armor, weapons, vehicles, and anything with a machined edge. Organic sculpting is mostly Build and Surface brushes; hard-surface sculpting lives here. The technique is to Scrape a broad flat, Scrape a second flat at an angle to it, and let the intersection of the two form a crisp edge — which is faster and looser than modeling that edge by hand.
Fill and Scrape are worth thinking of as a pair: same plane, opposite halves. Fill only touches what's below the plane, Scrape only what's above. Alternating them is a fast way to even out a bumpy region without the softening that Smooth would bring.
Grab and Mask: the two that aren't really brushes
Grab drags the surface with the cursor. It doesn't add, remove, or average anything — it moves what's already there, which makes it the proportion tool. Pull an ear into place, lengthen a jaw, fix a limb that's reading short. Do this at a low subdivision level while the mesh is still cheap to push around.
Mask paints protected areas, with Ctrl to erase. Masking is the single most underrated habit in sculpting: mask a finished region and you can work aggressively right up against it without fear. It turns "I'll be careful here" into "I don't have to be careful here," which is a much better way to work.
Which brushes should a beginner learn first?
Learn three: Clay for building volume, Smooth for resolving it, and Grab for fixing proportions. Those three cover the blocking stage, which is where beginners spend their first weeks. Add Crease and Flatten next for edges and hard surfaces. The other sixteen brushes in Re:Form are refinements you can pick up one at a time as you hit a problem they solve.
The failure mode worth naming is brush tourism — clicking through every icon looking for the one that makes the sculpt good. No brush does that. Form comes from checking your silhouette from a new angle every few strokes, and any of the build brushes will get you there if you keep orbiting. If you want a guided run at the whole loop instead of a blank canvas, the first-sculpt walkthrough covers navigation, blocking, symmetry, and export in one sitting.
How do these map to ZBrush and Blender brushes?
The concepts transfer; the names don't. Blender's brush names verified against the Blender Manual and ZBrush's against Maxon's documentation, both as of July 2026:
| Re:Form | Blender | ZBrush |
|---|---|---|
| Draw | Draw — pushes vertices in and out along the surface direction | Standard — displaces outward, "adding clay"; Alt carves in |
| Draw Sharp | Draw Sharp — same as Draw with a much sharper falloff, for creases | — |
| Clay Ribbon | Clay Strips — like Clay but more aggressive, with a square falloff | — |
| Clay | Clay — Draw plus a flattening effect and subtle smoothing | — |
| Inflate | Inflate — inflates geometry outwards or inwards | Inflate — pushes along individual vertex normals |
| Crease | Crease — sharp indents or ridges, pinching vertices together | — |
| Pinch | Pinch — pulls vertices toward the brush center | Pinch — pulls vertices together |
| Smooth | Smooth — evens out irregularities within the brush influence | Smooth — moves detail toward an average surface level |
| Flatten | Flatten — pulls vertices toward an averaged area plane | Flatten — presses surfaces into planar formations |
| Fill | Fill — pushes surfaces inwards, or fills with Ctrl | — |
| Scrape | Scrape — scrapes with two angled planes, forming a sharp edge | — |
| Grab | Grab — moves vertices along with the mouse | Move — repositions and reshapes existing geometry |
| — | Snake Hook — picks up and lets go of geometry mid-stroke | SnakeHook — pulls out horns, tendrils, and branches |
That last row is the honest one. Blender and ZBrush both ship deformation brushes that dynamically grab and extend geometry as you drag, and Re:Form has no equivalent today. Both are far more mature tools than a browser app in alpha, and we say so at more length in the Blender comparison. What Re:Form's set covers is the everyday build/surface/plane loop, which is most of what most sculpts need.
Settings change a brush more than its name does
Two people using the same Draw brush can produce completely different marks, because the modifiers do more work than the brush choice:
- Size and Strength. Strength defaults low on purpose. Three light passes beat one heavy one, in any tool, on any brush.
- Falloff. How soft the brush edge is. This is the dial that decides whether a stroke reads as a swell or a ridge — often it's what you actually wanted instead of a different brush.
- Ctrl to invert. Every build brush has an opposite. Carve becomes a ridge, Noise becomes dents, Draw becomes a dent. That halves the number of brushes you need to remember.
- Shift to smooth. Held, not selected, so smoothing never breaks your rhythm.
- Spacing, Accumulate, and Clay feel. Spacing sets the distance between dabs; the other two control whether a held stroke keeps building or hits a ceiling.
- Stroke type. Draw, Spray, Line, Dot, and Drag. A straight line of dabs placed as a gesture is more accurate than one dragged freehand — which matters a lot if you're on a mouse, as the drawing tablet post gets into.
- Brush alpha. Load a grayscale image and it shapes every dab — white is full strength, black leaves the surface untouched. That's how a plain round Draw becomes a scale stamp, a stitch, or a skin-pore texture. Re:Form takes PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF and PSD, with an invert toggle, and one alpha applies across all brushes at a time.
If a brush isn't doing what you expect, check Strength and Falloff before you go looking for a different icon.
Are all the brushes free?
Yes. Every brush and tool in Re:Form is on the free plan — all 21 sculpting brushes, masking, symmetry, sculpt layers, and vertex paint — up to roughly 12.5 million triangles, with OBJ import and export, local .clay saves, no watermark and no card. It needs a free sign-in, and it's desktop-only — any browser with WebGPU, which as of July 2026 means current Chrome and Edge, Firefox, and Safari 26 on macOS Tahoe. Nothing to download.
There's no brush paywall and there won't be one. Pro, at $9.99 a month or $99 a year, is about scale and output rather than tools: the full 50-million-triangle budget, STL, GLB and FBX import and export, and a commercial license to sell what you make. The FAQ has the fine print. If you'd rather just try the brushes than read about them, the app opens in a tab.
FAQ
What is the most used brush in 3D sculpting?
Some form of clay build-up brush, in nearly every tool. Blender's manual describes Clay Strips as "a common standard for building rough volumes," and clay-type brushes fill the same role in ZBrush and Re:Form. The reason is that clay brushes build toward an averaged plane, so repeated strokes accumulate into a coherent mass rather than amplifying the lumps already in the surface.
What's the difference between the Smooth and Relax brushes?
Smooth moves vertices toward the average position of their neighbors, which softens both the surface noise and the shape — use it to resolve a form. Relax redistributes the triangles more evenly across the surface with only a gentle effect on the shape, so it fixes stretched or tangled topology without flattening the detail you sculpted. Reach for Relax when the geometry is ugly but the silhouette is right.
Do I need custom or downloaded brushes to sculpt well?
No. Custom brushes are a convenience for repeated detail work — scales, stitching, stone texture — not a requirement for good form. Proportion, silhouette, and surface transitions all come from the standard set. Where custom assets do earn their keep is as brush alphas, and Re:Form's alpha loader takes any grayscale image you already have, so a stamp you find or paint works with the built-in brushes rather than replacing them.