Blender equivalent of these ZBrush features?

When he paints dark grey on the mesh it turns into a new mesh without destroying the original mesh, does blender have a feature or addon that provides such facilities? (roughly 5m into the timelapse)

Secondly there’s ZBrush’s polypaint feature (showcased in the video below), is vertex paint essentially the same thing or is there another feature or addon that would provide similar functionality?

what about this one where he sculpts on a plane and then uses it as a brush

oh and this one where he uses some sort of black magic to cut holes in things

aaand that’s all I can remember right now, there are probably more zbrush features I’m curious about but these are the most relevant ones.

When he paints dark grey on the mesh it turns into a new mesh without destroying the original mesh
I don’t see it at 5min mark but you describe the effect of mesh extract.

what about this one where he sculpts on a plane and then uses it as a brush
This is not ZBrush. It’s Sculptris. No time code to look at

is vertex paint essentially the same thing
Essentially yes, but polypaint can include both colour and material information

oh and this one where he uses some sort of black magic to cut holes in things
You don’t give a time code but mesh extract is being used to create new meshes from masking.

For mesh extract in blender you can look here http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?307767-MESH-EXTRACT-addon-dyntopo-subtool-operator

For a sculpted plane used as a brush, i imagine a Blender method would be

  • sculpt a plane
  • add another plane, unwrap it and assign a texture to that other plane
  • bake the sculpted plane on the other plane with the bake setting “Displacement”
  • save the resulting baked texture
  • use that texture as a brush texture for sculpt

black magic, he he .
It’s a boolean operation in dynamesh mode. (insert a mesh, hold alt when inserting) (in zb)
In blender, add a mesh and use boolean operations. Alternatively, lasso select faces in edit mode and use the bridge edge tool. You can now enter sculpt-dyntopo mode and fine sculpt it.

okay, the mesh extract addon seems to do what I want, thanks for linking to it.

This is not ZBrush. It’s Sculptris. No time code to look at

Actually, the second half of the video where he does detailing is in zbrush and he starts sculpting planes at 18:40 and a bit later he uses them as a brush, either way Sanctuary highlighted a workaround that should work (seems a tad redundant but it’s better than nothing, at least I can reuse them later)

Essentially yes, but polypaint can include both colour and material information

and vertex paint is just color data? I’m fine with that, it’s the most relevant part anyway, it might prove a bit inflexible later but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

You don’t give a time code but mesh extract is being used to create new meshes from masking.

Ah, my bad it’s at 26 minutes in.
Either way I can’t really see how mesh extract is relevant to this except maybe for working around it by masking the areas I want to cut out and then using the boolean subtract operation on it, from what I can tell he is literally sculpting holes in the mesh (which would be an amazing thing to play with, it would speed up my workflow a lot)

EDIT: Even though the mesh extract addon seems to do what I want all the links are dead, it doesn’t really matter how awesome it is if I can’t download it :confused:

Ah, my bad it’s at 26 minutes in.
They are in dynamesh mode and using an insert cylinder brush set to subtract to cut the hole


ah got it got it, I assume the closest equivalent in blender is the boolean modifier then?