Two tools that quietly do half your work for you: symmetry sculpts the other side, masking stops you ruining the parts you've finished.

Symmetry

Symmetry X is on by default — the toggle lives in the Options section. Every stroke mirrors across the X axis, so left and right stay identical: sculpt one cheekbone and both appear.

A sphere seen from the front with one stroke sculpted on the right side and its exact mirror on the left
One stroke, two results — the mirror half lands as you drag.

Symmetry applies to sculpting, masking and painting alike. Turn it off for asymmetric work — scars, poses, anything deliberately lopsided — and back on when you return to structure. Since it mirrors strokes (not geometry), work done with symmetry off stays asymmetric even after you re-enable it.

✦

Need a mirrored copy of a whole layer instead — a second eye, a second ear? That's the Layers panel's Duplicate + Mirror pairing; see Working with layers.

Masking

The Mask brush (Utility group in the brush picker) paints protection onto the surface instead of moving it. Masked areas darken, and sculpting strokes slide over them without effect — full mask means fully protected, half mask means half-strength strokes.

A dark masked crescent painted on the left side of a sphere
Mask painted — the darkened area is protected.
The same sphere after an Inflate pass: everything swelled except the masked crescent
An Inflate pass over everything — the masked area holds its shape.

While the Mask brush is active, its tools appear inside the Brush section:

  • Invert — swap protected and free areas. The classic move: mask the thing you want to work on, invert, sculpt everything else… or the reverse.
  • Clear — remove the mask everywhere.
  • Sharpen / Blur — crisp the mask's edges, or soften them for gradual transitions.
  • Grow / Shrink — expand or contract the masked area by one ring of vertices per press.

Mask strokes are part of undo like everything else — Ctrl+Z reverses the last mask stroke exactly.

Masking beyond sculpting

Masks also gate the object transform tools: with a mask down, Move / Rotate / Scale leave the masked vertices behind — an easy way to pose part of a form. See Grab & transforms.

Next: Reference images.