Every brush shares one set of dials, in the Brush section of the right panel. Learn them once and every brush in the app becomes adjustable.

The Brush panel: stroke type selector and the Size, Strength, Falloff, Spacing, Drag and Jitter sliders plus the Alpha slot
The Brush panel. Click any slider's number to type an exact value.

Size

The ring on the mesh shows the real area the stroke will touch. The slider's travel is perceptual — the lower half of the knob's range covers the small sizes, where precision matters — and the readout always shows the true size. Click the readout to type a value; Enter applies, Escape cancels.

Brush size is zoom-invariant: it's a real-world size on the mesh, not a screen size, so zooming in makes the same brush cover more of your screen without changing what it does to the surface.

Strength

How strongly each stroke moves the surface. Low strength plus repeated passes is almost always nicer than one heavy pass — it builds form the way real clay does.

Falloff

Falloff sets where the fade begins inside the brush. Everything inside the cursor's inner ring is full strength; from that ring to the edge, the stroke fades out.

  • 1.0 — full strength all the way to the edge: a hard, crisp stamp.
  • 0.5 — half core, half fade: firm but soft-shouldered.
  • 0.0 — fully soft: the fade starts at the centre.
Three vertical strokes on a sphere sculpted with falloff 1.0, 0.5 and 0.0, from hard-edged to fully soft
The same stroke at Falloff 1.0, 0.5 and 0.0 (left to right): hard edge, firm shoulder, fully soft.

Spacing, Drag & Jitter

  • Spacing — the distance between dabs along a stroke. Smaller spacing lays dabs closer together for denser, smoother strokes; larger spacing shows individual stamps.
  • Drag — stroke inertia. The stamp trails behind the cursor on a delay, which irons hand wobble out of long lines.
  • Jitter — the opposite: the stroke line wanders with a hand-drawn, kinked offset. Fissure 02 uses it for organic crack lines.

For surgical steadiness there's also Stabilize in the Options section — the brush follows the cursor on a taut string and only moves once you pull past a radius. Great for clean curves.

Stroke types

The Stroke dropdown changes how dabs are laid down:

  • Draw — dabs follow your drag. The default.
  • Spray — dabs scatter inside the brush like an airbrush.
  • Line — press, drag, release: a straight line of dabs, previewed live on the mesh.
  • Dot — one dab that follows the cursor until you release.
  • Drag — one stamp, sized and rotated by your drag.

Brush alphas

The Alpha slot takes a grayscale image that shapes every dab — white hits at full strength, black leaves the surface untouched, and the image orients itself to your stroke direction. Load any image (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD…), then tune it with the Contrast, Blur and Sharpness sliders; Invert flips it so the stamp carves where it built. It's the fastest route to skin pores, fabric weave, scales and stamped ornament.

✦

Every brush remembers its own settings — switching from Draw to Clay and back restores each brush exactly as you left it, and your settings ride along inside saved .clay files.

Next: Symmetry & masking.