How To Use the Pose Brush in Blender

If you often work in sculpt mode in Blender, you can choose from a vast range of brushes that will satisfy your needs. Blender adds in a new brush from time to time to its repertoire. Some of these new brushes are pretty good, some are excellent, it depends on what you actually need. Anyway, today I’d like to show you how to use the new pose brush in a very basic scenario and I hope you will take to it and experiment with it on your own.

Pose Brush

So, what is the pose brush? The pose brush lets you sculpt your mesh as if there was an armature in it, although there isn’t. Let’s create a simple mesh to demonstrate how it works. I’m using the 2.81 version of Blender.

Here’s a simple setup: Create a torus and rotate it: R X 90

In edit mode remove the upper part of the torus. For our purposes this will do. Just a quick reminder: the easiest way of removing part of a mesh is selecting it in wireframe shading (so that you can see the vertices, edges and faces at the back of the mesh as well) and hitting X on the keyboard. If you are following along, you should have something like this now:

Go to sculpt mode and select the pose brush. As you now approach the mesh, you can see something that looks like a bone. You can now deform the mesh as if it really was a bone. You can change the radius of the brush for different effects. Try it out.

As mentioned before, these are just the basics. You can now experiment with the pose brush or read more about it in Blender documentation. I think the brush is pretty promising.

Here’s the video version: