Isolate lives on the rail right after Pick. It doesn't paint — it changes what you can see and reach, so the tools that do paint can get at a surface that another part of the model was blocking.
It works two ways. Cut chops the model along a line you drag and hides everything in front of that line, toward you. Isolate marked area keeps a patch you've marked plus everything behind it, and hides whatever's between that patch and the camera. Either way the hidden geometry doesn't just disappear from view — it also goes un-clickable, so a stroke can't accidentally land on the thing you were trying to see past. Your paint goes where you're looking.
Nothing is deleted. A Show all pill sits at the top of the viewport the moment anything is hidden — one tap restores the whole model, paint and all.
- Painting into a crevice. Between fingers, into a cockpit, behind a cape, down the throat of a dragon — anywhere a near surface keeps stealing your clicks.
- Reaching the inside of a closed form. Cut the front off a helmet or a hull and paint the interior wall like it was facing you the whole time.
- Cleaning up a back face you can't orbit to. Isolate it and the camera-side geometry stops getting in the way.
- Checking a slice of the model without committing to anything — cut, look, Show all.
Cut — slice along a line:
- Pick Isolate on the rail, then choose Cut horizontally or Cut vertically.
- Drag a line across the view. The model chops at that line and everything in front of it — toward you — hides.
- Wrong side gone? Hit Flip to swap which half stays.
- Paint the revealed surface. The hidden side is un-clickable, so every stroke lands on the geometry behind the cut.
- Tap Show all (the pill at the top of the viewport) when you're done. The model comes back whole.
Isolate marked area — keep what you marked:
- Mark the surface you want with the Mark tool — drag over the patch you care about.
- Switch to Isolate and choose Isolate marked area.
- Layerpaint keeps your marked patch and everything behind it, and hides whatever was in front — a finger over a crease just vanishes.
- Paint freely. What's hidden can't catch your clicks.
- Show all to bring the rest back.
- Cut, then Magic Fill. Once the front is hidden, an interior wall behaves like any other exposed surface — tap it with Magic Fill and it floods to its seams.
- Combine a cut with a mark. Cut away the bulk that's in the way, then Mark a precise patch on what's left and scope a clean-up to just it.
- Orbit while isolated. The hidden geometry stays hidden as you turn the model, so you can work a recess from a few angles without it filling back in.
- Drag, don't tap, for a cut. The cut follows the line you draw across the view — a stray click won't place it.
Hiding geometry never touches your mesh or your paint. You can cut, isolate, paint, cut a different way, and hit Show all at any point — the model you exported would still be the whole thing. Isolate just decides what's in your way right now.