I don’t know if the current version of Mudbox already does this or not to be perfectly honest, but the idea came to me this morning.

I was thinking about how easy it is to squish a model around so much that it’s just a mess, and I was thinking about ways to limit that.

Here’s the idea. I’ll use a sphere as an example, but it’s an idea that could apply to any object.

So, you start with a sphere and you subdivide it so it’s very detailed so you can add texture to it, but you really don’t want it to not be a sphere any more in the basic shape. You could have two spheres. One would be invisible during modeling operations, but it would act as the selection area, or in this case the deselected area. Anything that would violate the space of the sphere would stop right there. I guess most of the effects in Mudbox are about the repositioning of vertices, so it would prevent the vertices from entering its space. I suppose it could be described as simple collision detection as a principle.

Think of it as the 3D version of what Photoshop selection areas do in 2D. You could use a path to make a nice circle or square or whatever kind of shape you want and turn it into a selection area. Then anything you do with a brush or other tool outside of that area does nothing. It only affects the image layer you’re on within that selection area. Then you could invert the selection so your actions only affect the area outside and not the inside.

Let’s say you have a humanoid, but you want to make textures all over it. You could have one as the deselected area, and the other is the model you’re working with. Then if you tried to mush in the eyes or whatever, it wouldn’t work while the selection is active. You could only expand outward or flatten to the shape of the object being used as a selection area.

You could also use a different object as the selection area. Let’s say you wanted to take a big rocky object and squash it down into the shape of a man. You could use a model of a man as the deselected area and the rocky object could be mashed and pushed around all the way up to the surface of the model of the man, but no farther.

Does this make sense to anyone? Or is this already a feature in Mudbox and I’m just not up to speed on it?