This is a big one. @Ghostwalden sent me a heavily extended version of the plugin they had built on top of a previous version, and most of it is now part of the official plugin. Huge thanks to them for the work and for offering it back! I've merged their features into the current version, so everything from v5 (mask fill modes, mirror fixes, grab along normal, ALT brush sizing) is still here, and the controls remain the same as what you're used to: Shift sculpts out, Space sculpts in.
New features:
Fixes and changes:
- Reworked UI, now organized into pages: Main, Mesh Parts Adjust, Advanced, Appearance, Reference Image and Instructions
- Mesh Brush: the brush now shows the actual vertices and wireframe it will affect instead of a plain highlight
- Reference Image: load an image (with a file browser) and show it as an overlay on screen while you sculpt, with position, size and transparency controls
- Single Vertex Gizmo: click a vertex to attach a movable gizmo with axis and plane handles for precise single-vertex placement, plus camera focus on the selected vertex
- Mesh Parts Adjust: move and rotate whole mesh regions (for example the head) with the surrounding skin following, useful for lining up head swaps
- New Rotate tool: twists the brushed region, Shift and Space turn opposite ways
- Grab Axis option: lock the grab tool to a single axis or plane
- Sculpt Area: limit sculpting to part of the mesh, and hide or dim mesh areas you're not working on
- Sliders now come in metre and millimetre pairs for finer control
- Better morph name field: shows whether a name is free or would overwrite, and the saved morph list refreshes automatically
- Sculpt Amount slider + Bake Sculpt Amount button: the slider fades your entire working sculpt between 0 and full strength, and Bake makes the faded version the new 100% so you can keep sculpting from there
- Options to temporarily disable auto expressions, auto blink and eyes look-at while sculpting
- Improved ALT brush sizing: the cursor now stays hidden and frozen in place while adjusting, ALT + RMB adjusts strength (Ctrl + ALT still works like before)
- On-screen Brush Strength readout while adjusting strength with the mouse or the - and = keys
- Optional "Hide Targets in Sculpt Mode" (off by default): hides all atoms from selection while sculpting. Note that this includes the Person itself, so if you click into the scene you'll need Select > Show Hidden to get the UI back. Only turn this on if that trade is worth it to you
- Smooth tool strength fixed: it now responds properly across the whole strength range instead of feeling weak even at maximum
- The plugin's internal working morphs no longer show up in the Morphs tab. While you sculpt, the plugin stores your unsaved work in two hidden helper morphs called "MorphSculptor A" and "MorphSculptor B". These used to appear as sliders in the Morphs tab, where they always read 0 and couldn't be changed by hand, which confused some people into thinking something was broken. They're now hidden like they should have been. Your actual saved morphs are unaffected and show up like normal.
New features
Fixes
- Tool grid: the brush tools are now a compact grid of buttons with the active tool highlighted in green, instead of a dropdown. This makes it faster to switch and easier to see what's selected.
- Mask fill modes: the Mask tool gets two fill modes alongside brush painting. Mesh Island fills the entire connected piece under the cursor (a whole eyeball, a tooth, the body), and Material Zone fills a whole material region (all teeth, eye parts, eyelashes, lips, and so on). In these modes the region under your cursor is highlighted so you can see what you'll be masking. Shift fills, Space erases.
- Grab along the normal: the Grab tool now has two directions. Hold Shift to drag freely in the camera view plane (as before), or Space to drag straight in and out along the surface normal, for clean pushes and pulls without sliding across the surface.
- Brush sizing shortcut: hold ALT and drag the mouse left/right to resize the brush. Hold Ctrl+ALT and drag to change strength instead. Similar to Blender's F shortcut (F is taken in VaM).
- Mirror symmetry: with Mirror enabled, a large brush (or the Grab tool) started near the body's centerline no longer pulls the other side along with it. The brush is now clipped at the centerline, vertices sitting exactly on the centerline stay put instead of being dragged sideways. Most noticeable with the Grab tool.
New features
Fixes and improvements
- Genital sculpting now fully works: the Genital sculpting is no longer experimental. Vertex positions are now read directly from the GPU, which fixed the misplaced wireframe, the unresponsive vertices, and the overlays not following your sculpt. It behaves exactly like body sculpting now, on any pose and any morphs. Huge thanks to @Eye9 for suggesting the GPU approach! I finally got it to work because of their comment.
- Erase tool: brush the sculpt back to the original body. Both SHIFT and SPACE erases, and it works in single-vertex mode too.
- Invertible morphs: a new "Save Range -1 to 1" toggle saves morphs with a -1 to 1 slider instead of 0 to 1, where negative values will apply the sculpt in the opposite direction. A "Convert Selected to -1..1 Range" button has been added that upgrades previously saved morphs to the same range.
- Body wireframe modes: the wireframe toggle is now Off / Wireframe / Solid. Solid hides the skin and shows a shaded wireframe body instead, so no skin clips through the wireframe on heavily morphed models and it stays clearly visible in brightly lit scenes. Clothing still shows in front for reference.
- Smooth tool reworked: it used to act like a slow eraser, flattening bumps into the skin. It now smooths out jagged, uneven areas while keeping the overall shape and volume, and softens the transition into the surrounding skin. Use the new Erase tool when you actually want to remove sculpting.
- Grab strength: the Grab tool's drag response now scales with Brush Strength. Default strength is 1:1 with the mouse, a lower is finer control, a higher value is amplified.
- Mask Tint Offset now defaults to 0.02 so the mask tint stays visible above clothing.
New features
Fixes & Improvements
- Mask tool: paint areas that are protected from sculpting. Shift paints, Space erases, orange tint shows the masked area. Works with every tool including Grab and vertex mode.
- Clear Mask / Invert Mask buttons.
- Show Mask Tint toggle: temporarily hide the tint without clearing the mask. When using the mask tool, hiding will not work (to prevent masking blindly)
- Mask Tint Offset slider: raise the mask overlay off the skin so it stays visible above clothing when masking under a bra or panties.
- Load Selected for Editing: loads a previously saved morph into the sculpt buffer to continue working on it. Its slider resets to 0 (the shape moves into the buffer, so nothing visually changes), the name box picks up its name, and re-saving with the same name overwrites while a new name will make a copy. One undo step reverts the load.
- Genital sculpting (EXPERIMENTAL): a new Sculpt Target dropdown adds a Genitals mode with its own morph bank and save folder, so sculpts save as real genital morphs. Please read the note below.
- Grab tool direction fix: grabbed vertices used to drift in a wrong direction that changed with camera angle, worst on heavily morphed characters. The drag should now follow the mouse correctly, and drag distance is right on scaled atoms too.
- Close-up picking fix: picking vertices stopped working when the camera got within 5 cm of the mesh. Now works down to 2 mm, so you can zoom in for fine work.
- Finer brush control: the strength slider shows 4 decimals to improve precision work. Brush Radius got the same change, and the minimums for Brush Radius and Vertex View Radius dropped from 5 mm to 2 mm.
- Overwrite protection: saving over an existing morph name asks for a second click to confirm.
- Delete protection: deleting a saved morph asks for a second click, and the deleted morph is set to 0 so what you see matches what is on disk.
About the experimental genital sculpting
Genital sculpting does not work the same as body sculpting, and right now I can't get it any better than this. The genitals are a separate grafted mesh inside VaM, and the data the plugin needs to show you where those vertices are is broken on VaM's side in several ways. Sculpting itself works, and saved morphs come out correct in the proper genital morphs folder, but the wireframe and brush overlays can sit in the wrong place on morphed or posed models, and some vertices may not respond to the brush. It works best on a model with few or no morphs in a neutral pose. The plugin shows a red warning when you select the Genitals target as a reminder. I'll try revisiting this in the future, but for now this is the best I can get it.