The manual says the Magnify brush is the opposite of Pinch, but then says to really do this instead of blow your surface out like a balloon, you must turn the “magnify value” to zero. But there is no magnify level slider!
“The Magnify brush moves vertices away from the cursor, and optionally displaces them up or down; it’s the inverse of the Pinch Brush. The name comes from the appearance of vertices as you move the brush around using the DragDot stroke; the vertices literally look as if they are being magnified. The magnifying (pushing out) and displacement (pushing up) effects can be controlled separately. For example, to ‘expand out’ the vertices in part of plane, without offsetting the surface, set the Magnify value to 0, and Z Intensity to a satisfactorily high value.”
Using the Alt key on the Pinch brush doesn’t have any affect I can see.
Using Alt on the Magnify brush just bulges the balloon inwards instead of out.
I’m trying to project Topology patches into undercuts by moving and pinching vertices to better populate undercuts like nostrils, but sometimes the pinching is too much or in the wrong place so I get overlapping mesh artifacts upon reprojection and I cannot spread it out directly with proper control over it. Only the smooth brush can help but it won’t spread things out and also flattens features.
Where is this elusive “magnify value” setting? I don’t see it in brush options.
Why not have Alt-Pinch spread vertices out along the existing surface instead of have Alt-Pinch not have a modifier effect at all?
In an older PDF I see mention of a Magnify control:
“Magnify Controls
Magnify: When the magnify button/slider is selected, sculpting will cause a displacement to the surface, at the same time that vertices are pushed outward along the surface. A value of 0 will not change the surface elevation, but points will still be pushed outward along the surface. The slider intensity determines how much vertices are pushed outward from the surface.The standard Z Intensity setting controls the magnitude of the magnification effect.”
The recently added low and high pressure magnify sliders and magnify curve in the brush modifier Alpha and Texture is not it since that’s for magnify alphas with pen pressure: “Other changes include a new Magnify slider for brushes, which magnifies the centre of the alpha being applied to a stroke based on pen pressure, generating a range of interesting custom effects.”
Another clue is how the standard brush modifier behaves but with Magnify it merely seems to change the overall strength of the same old ballooning:
“The Brush Modifier slider adds a secondary effect to your brush. There are two possible effects depending on which brush is selected. For the Standard Brush the Brush Modifier slider effects the amount of pinch (if positive) or the amount of inflation (if negative). For all other brushes the Brush Modifier slider acts as elevation. The slider determines how much elevation the brush will add (if positive) or subtract (if negative).”
PARTIAL SOLUTION: The Magnify brush main brush modifier slider indeed carries from negative to positive and when set to 0 no longer balloons the surface and you can still give it enough Z Intensity to do something, namely spread out vertices.
It’s a difficult solution since it also often distorts the surface instead of retains its original form. But then again so does the Pinch brush. It’s just hard to smooth the teeter-totter like distortion since the Smooth brush immediately relaxes the expanded vertices! The distortion is mainly caused by brush dragging in a single stroke whereas very short strokes act more locally as you just wiggle a big in one place, but overall it’s just not as well behaved as Pinch.
It helps that I’m re-projecting to a base mesh anyway, so the slight remaining distortions that cannot be smoothed out without re-pinching are erased.
Might there be any way to avoid this teeter-totter distortion like the surface is being rotated in and outward? The rotation is clearly an artifact of slight ballooning out where the surface is curved in the direction it is already a mound, so both convex and concave curvature is amplified. Yes, that’s a neutral effect but it’s still a silly result compared to how well Pinch works to retain original surface position.
What works much better than various brushes for smoothing out the distorted surface while retaining the expanded vertices is to mask out the rest of the mesh and use Deformation modifiers like Relax and Polish. So even without a base mesh projection target I can expand vertices fairly well. Masking also allows using a very large brush for low Z Intensity manual smoothing that gives the same moderate result.
Attachments