Tips for creating smooth lines?

The super smooth looking sculpts on the Nomad front page are not retopologized I hope? So, tricks exist to achieve a super smooth look with Nomad I’m guessing, but how?

When I zoom in on my sculpts, they look very shaky, and all I know how to do is to reduce the move tool and try to straighten it out bit by bit, but that’s extremely time consuming and never becomes smooth… :sweat_smile:

lately i’ll use a pinch brush on the edges to sharpen them up/remove bumps, and a combo flatten and smooth for the top of ridges like that. I keep forgetting the trick others use of the ‘keep sharp edges’ optin in the stroke filter settings, can help too.

quick test, seems to work.

so the workflow:

-layer brush, high intensity, draw the basic shape, looks janky
-grab brush to put some hills and valleys in of this ‘road’
-pinch brush, run along the outer edges of the road, tightens and smooths them
-smooth brush to do broad smoothing
-go into stroke options, filter, ‘keep sharp edges’, reduce to 20 degrees
-make the smooth brush wide, can aggressively smooth the sides of the road, the top of the road, it will keep the edges mostly intact
-subdivide once, a little more pinch and smooth.

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Thank you so much for the tips!

I didn’t realize that’s what keep sharp edges do (and also, the UI is a bit weird… there’s a green clock dial but you can’t drag on it, you have to type).

However, I’m still having problems with the edges themselves now being jagged, and weirdly, regardless of which pressure profile curve I choose for the crease brush, I can’t get them to straighten out…

…and even more weirdly, now that I’ve smoothed the surfaces, when I use the crease to try to see if I can get a super sharp corner, again regardless if I invert or not, the brush digs down as you can see in the “bite” on the curve here:

Oh, wait… you said pinch, not crease!

Ok, wow that’s some difference:

But hmm, seems it’s still super wobbly when I rotate the view away from the camera angle which I made the strokes in…

(Also, despite switching profile curves to something I thought looked a bit round, the pinching is still super sharp… hopefully there’s a setting for a radius somewhere… and that I won’t have issues with wobbly radiuses as well.) :sweat_smile:

I tend to get my camera at 45 degrees to the curve, paint the longest pinch brush stroke I can, relatively low intensity, and keep checking it from multiple angles. Ultimately this is sculpting, not CAD, if clay sculptors have to keep turning their work and looking from many angles to see if forms are correct, then so do we. :slight_smile:

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