When sculpting, the 'Smooth' tool provides an important function that evens out bumpy, irregular surfaces. By averaging the positions of vertices under the brush tip, surface inconsistencies and detail will disappear producing a result similar to melting (as if the surface were made of wax). The Smooth tool is essential to the sculpting workflow, so much so that it is always available when using any of the other sculpting tools. By simply holding down the Shift key when sculpting, users can access the Smooth tool while any other tool is active. The 'Smooth' tool itself can be found under the 'Paint' tab for the interface in the 'Sculpt' submenu of the toolbox. The tool can also be called from the menu bar under the "Texture > Sculpt Tools" menu. Additionally, the tool can be combined with the various 'Tips' as well as the 'Inks' and 'Nozzle' to further customize the way the brush affects the surface. When activated the following attributes are displayed in the Properties panel.
Sculpt: Smooth--
Sculpt Mode: The 'Sculpt Mode' determines which method of sculpting is to be used. By default the setting is 'Automatic' which will perform mesh based sculpts when there are no displacement images and automatically switch to image based sculpting when there an image is available. There are times when you may want to force MODO into mesh based sculpting even if you have an image applied for displacement. This can be very helpful for blocking out shapes and form, as mesh sculpting is only affecting the cage vertices of the base geometry.
Automatic-- chooses between mesh and image sculpting depending on availability of displacement image map texture.
Mesh-- forces the tools to perform mesh sculpting only.
Image Map (Details)-- forces the tools to perform image sculpting only.
Offset Amount: The 'Offset Amount' value determines the strength of the smoothing applied to the surface.
Soft Filter: This option only applies to image based sculpting and will soften the image map by filtering out small details producing a different result over the standard 'Smooth' function.
