Sculpting, Masking

MASKING is a powerful tool you can use in many different ways.
Now, I love the tool, but I hate to explain it... call me crazy, but ill give it my best shot!

Anyhow MASKING works on the principal of hiding parts of the Mesh you don't want to be affected with your brushes, atleast that's one of the things masking is helpful with.
Another one is, when you are working on a high poly mesh that you Computer can barely run, you can always hide away parts of the mesh and just work on one single part.

I don't know all the names of MASKING techniques so I'll just name them how they are achieved;

BASIC MASKING, CTRL+LEFT CLICK 
- so this is the basic principle of masking, used most commonly when hiding parts of the mesh you want to keep unaffected,
looks something like this;

The greyed out area is masked and cant be effected with your brushes, the rest can.
You can always soften the masked area just by CTRL+Clicking on the un-masked parts, this helps with the transaction between the two;
And if you want to fine-tune your mask, you can always CTRL+ALT+Click to unmask the parts that you masked for whatever reason.

And if you ever want to invert the masked part without going into its tool, you can just press CTRL+I.

There is one more option aswell, just to show the masked area, I don't know what the keyboard shortcut is but it can be accessed under Tools/Visibility and then ''Hide Unmasked''

And if you want to remove all the masking its simple as CTRL+click and drag anywhere in the empty canvas, ofcourse thats one of the ways you can mask too if you drag over the mesh, gives more precise results.




LASSO MASKING, CTRL+SHIFT+CLICK / DRAG
this method hides everything apart from the bit you masked (keep in mind that the >X< symmetry works in this case too) and it looks somewhat like this;

And once you released all the keys you end up with something like this;

This process can work vice versa too, if you want to hide the parts that you hover over the key combination goes something like this (its a bit tedious) CTRL+SHIFT+Click/drag until you see the GREEN square and then release the SHIFT key and instead press ALT while still holding CTRL and dragging, if you done everything right a the GREEN square should change its colour to RED... sounds like a old Tomb Raider cheat I know.


POLYGON MASKING, CTRL+SHIFT+CLICK on a polygon cluster (while in polygon wireframe mode)

First of to get into Polygon Wireframe Mode you have to click here;

Once your in it, you can just CTRL+SHIFT+Click on the polygon group (every group has a different colour)
and it will automatically mask out everything apart from that bit, and to only hide that bit you have to click on it once again while holding CTRL+SHIF.

Same process goes for the rest of the polygon groups, you can always add/hide add more... and if you want to return it back to normal all you have to do is CTRL+SHIFT+Click on the empty canvas.

This process comes in really handy for the next part of the tutorial, and helps out with rewriting only the topology you want to rewrite.