Hello Blue!
I think we just need to adjust your strategy a bit. For instance, when performing an extract, you can set exactly the thickness that you want for an edge. Why not make your petals much thinner out of the gate, and then add any thickness to the petals in places you want?
Rather than using a plane, sculpting a quick source mesh to extract from that will generate a petal extract already shaped in the manner you wish is another way to avoid distorting the petals too much. The need to shape them will be minimal.
Further tips are collapsed below:
Click to read about polygroups
Also, switch on Polyframe mode (shift +F) for one of your extracted petals. You’ll notice that the front and back are cleanly separated polygroups, and the edge is another. This makes it very easy to affect one without affecting any of the others. Brush up on the various shortcuts for quickly hiding or masking polygroups, mask all but the surface you want to move, and then move or inflate it inward or outward as desired.
Possible tools to use for this:
- Inflat Brush
- Tool> Deformation > Inflate
- Gizmo or Transpose, scale and inflate functions. (Unlock Gizmo manipulator and then click on the middle of the target surface to position , or use “Go to Unmasked Mesh center”. Re-lock)
- In the case of a low or medium density mesh, ZModeler>Polygon> Inflate or QMesh> Polygroup Island.
Click to read about Low Poly vs High poly for sculpting
Finally, by the way of general advice, it can be much easier to deform low poly meshes without distortion, than it is to make big changes to a high poly mesh without negative effects. High poly meshes are “mushy”, while low poly meshes are “stiff”. Create your petals at a lower polygon resolution if you want to be able to make major changes to the form without as much distortion, and then subdivide them to sculpt fine surface detail.
You can do this by performing your extracts on a lower poly version of your target mesh. The lower poly the mesh that you mask for an extract, the lower poly the resulting extracts will be. You could also use the topology brush to draw very low poly meshes, then extract them this way. The topo brush will not create a new subtool for you though, and will have to split into a separate subtool with one of the options in the Subtool>Split menu.
