These brushes — Smooth, Relax and Polish from the Smooth and mask group, Noise and Rake from Detail — don't add or remove mass; they change surface quality: calming it, crisping it, or texturing it. On a new sphere or box, Smooth and Relax are exactly symmetric under Symmetry X.

Smooth

Smooth relaxes bumps and noise toward the surrounding surface. It's so central that it has a permanent shortcut: hold Shift with any brush active and you're smoothing. Smooth starts at full Strength, so a pass evens things out quickly; lower it when you only want to soften detail gently rather than erase it.

A noisy patch on a sphere after one Smooth pass over its right half, the grain softened there
One full-strength pass over the right half — the grain eases back toward the form.

Relax

Relax looks like Smooth but has a different job: it evens out the triangle flow and smooths away pinch points (small spikes and dents where vertices bunch up) with almost no change to the overall shape — it never shrinks the form the way Smooth does. After heavy pushing and pulling, triangles get stretched and cramped; Relax redistributes them so later strokes behave evenly again. Use it when the surface starts responding unevenly but you don't want to lose the shape — and when the whole mesh needs it, that's Remesh.

Polish

Polish skims off small bumps and noise while preserving the big forms underneath — closer to fine sanding than to Smooth's general softening. It's the pass that makes hard-surface planes read clean.

A noisy patch with Polish run over its right half, the fine grain skimmed off while the larger lumps and the sphere's form remain
Polish — noise goes, the underlying form stays.

Noise

Noise sprinkles organic bumpy grain across the surface — rough skin, weathered stone, orange peel. Inverted, it presses the same pattern inward. Vary the brush size between passes: large-scale noise under small-scale noise reads far more natural than one frequency alone.

Organic bumpy grain applied with the Noise brush
Noise — organic grain in one pass.

Rake

Rake drags a comb across the surface, leaving parallel tooth ridges that follow your stroke — the marks a toothed metal rake leaves in real clay. It's built for tooling marks, hair flow, bark and fur. Inverted, the comb cuts in as grooves.

Parallel comb lines following a curved stroke made with the Rake brush
Rake — teeth follow the stroke.
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Surface brushes need resolution to work with — polishing or raking a coarse mesh just moves its few triangles around. If the result looks faceted, subdivide first.

Next: the Plane brushes.