The Surface group doesn't add or remove mass — it changes surface quality: calming it, crisping it, or texturing it.

Smooth

Smooth relaxes bumps and noise toward the surrounding surface. It's so central that it has a permanent shortcut: hold Shift with any brush active and you're smoothing. Strength matters — a light smooth softens detail gently, a strong one erases it.

A noisy patch on a sphere with its right half smoothed flat
A noisy patch, smoothed on the right — lumps ease back toward the form.

Relax

Relax looks like Smooth but has a different job: it evens out the triangle flow with almost no change to the overall shape. After heavy pushing and pulling, triangles get stretched and cramped; Relax redistributes them so later strokes behave evenly again. Use it when the surface starts responding unevenly but you don't want to lose the shape — and when the whole mesh needs it, that's Remesh.

Polish

Polish skims off small bumps and noise while preserving the big forms underneath — closer to fine sanding than to Smooth's general softening. It's the pass that makes hard-surface planes read clean.

A noisy patch partially polished, small bumps skimmed off while the large form remains
Polish — noise goes, the underlying form stays.

Noise

Noise sprinkles organic bumpy grain across the surface — rough skin, weathered stone, orange peel. Inverted, it presses the same pattern inward. Vary the brush size between passes: large-scale noise under small-scale noise reads far more natural than one frequency alone.

Organic bumpy grain applied with the Noise brush
Noise — organic grain in one pass.

Rake

Rake drags a comb across the surface, leaving parallel tooth ridges that follow your stroke — the marks a toothed metal rake leaves in real clay. It's built for tooling marks, hair flow, bark and fur. Inverted, the comb cuts in as grooves.

Parallel comb ridges following a curved stroke made with the Rake brush
Rake — teeth follow the stroke.
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Surface brushes need resolution to work with — polishing or raking a coarse mesh just moves its few triangles around. If the result looks faceted, subdivide first.

Next: the Plane brushes.