Alt+B override mirror sculpt?

I don’t know whether it is a feature or a bug, so I ask first…

When sculpting an object, I find it convenient to hide part of the object with alt+b…

Let say… hands, I hide everything except the hand I want to sculpt expecting the other hand to be modified even if it not visible.

But doing modifications on the hands that is not hidden, the hand that is invisible is not updated.
But when alt+b is not used to hide the other hand, it is updated.

Mirror sculpting is enabled in all cases.

This is not consistent with the behaviour you should logically have.

What’s your opinion? :spin:

Hmm. Is it not? From my understanding the rationale has always been: “Hidden” areas are protected. And after all, Alt-B is just another way of hiding parts of the mesh.

Did not think of it that way.

Is there a way to override this protection to at least allow mirror sculpting? If not I guess I will have to live with that…

PS : nevermind… found the symmetrize option below :slight_smile:

Just a note, ALT+B , while hiding things visually as it clip the borders of the view you define , the actual hide function in Blender is holding H and making your selection (ALT+H to un-hide)
The major difference is performance, ALT+B does not hide anything in term of viewport calculations, whike H effectively hide things and result in much improved performance when you hide most parts of a multi-million poly sculpt.

Now for your problem, the only “simple” fix i can imagine is the case you are using Dyntopo for sculpting, the Dyntopo tab has a button named “Symmetrize”
You define the direction and click Symmetrize.
This allow you to mirror anything (according to the direction), so when you hide half a model and sculpt , you can then port everything you sculpted back into the previously hidden part.

For multires sculpting, i don’t know, out of applying the multires going to edit mode so you keep your high level details, then delete half the mesh and mirroring it, must be painfully slow at high multires sculpt tough.
In Edit Mode there’s W -> Symmetrize function that is similar to the Dyntopo Symmetrize, but you change the direction only -after- having done a W -> Symmetrize by either looking into the operator panel or pressing F6 to make it popup.

edit : took too much time to type, i noticed just now your edit