New in 0.10 Quad Remesh 2, elastic Kelvinlet brushes, hundreds of millions of polygons →

The free, open-source alternative to ZBrush and Mudbox

Sculpt it. Forge it.
Ship it.

Digital sculpting for VFX, animation and game studios on Linux, macOS and Windows, with a ZBrush-style keymap (and Blender and Maya styles) for artists switching over, and no subscription. It ships VFX Reference Platform builds, OpenUSD and a Python API for studio pipelines, one-click game-ready LODs and Send to Unreal, plus free built-in AI: describe a brush and Brush Lab builds it, or turn a sketch or a sentence into a model you can sculpt.

Sculpting for VFX, animation and games, with ZBrush-style keys available, VFX Reference Platform builds, OpenUSD and Python, plus free built-in AI: an AI brush creator and sketch to 3D.

Download For VFX & animation

VFX Reference Platform
Free built-in AI
No account
No telemetry
Windows · macOS · Linux

Real recording of SculptForge, scripted demo rendered at 4K.

Built for VFX & animation VFX Reference Platform CY2026 · CY2027 Rocky Linux 8 & 9 Python 3.13 OpenUSD Rez See how →

What's new in 0.10

New in 0.10.8: Tablets fixed. New in 0.10.7: A new look, clearer memberships, native Wayland. New in 0.10.6: PBR texturing in the viewport with fill layers and material recipes, quad-safe Smooth, backface culling, a crosshair cursor and a tablet fix. New in 0.10.5: a UV Editor, selection sets with a Morph brush, radial and local symmetry, strokes that start off the model, the timeline at the top, and a fix for the viewport on some Windows PCs. New in 0.10.4: insert your own meshes, Keep Masked remeshing, pie menus, a Maya bridge, Spanish and twelve new alphas. New in 0.10.3: alternate smooth, better masking, Part thumbnails and fixes from your requests. New in 0.10.2: Quad Remesh 2, Kelvinlet brushes and Capture from view. New in 0.10: micro levels for hundreds of millions of polygons, material painting (PBR), the Sculpt Timeline and a built-in benchmark. New in 0.9.7: faster big brushes on dense meshes and a right-click QuickMenu. New in 0.9.6: Extract, Mirror And Weld and a Flatpak. New in 0.9.5: Forge Spheres, Blender keys, flat shading, your own MatCaps and SpaceMouse support. New in 0.9.4: Soft Clay grey exports and self-updating AppImages. New in 0.9.3: a cleaner look, made for reading your sculpt. Before that, maquette to performance: scan a clay maquette with your phone, sculpt on the scan, give the head its facial shapes and drive them with your own face. Everything that changed · changelog

Tablets fixed new in 0.10.8

Tablets in Mouse mode follow the pen again on Windows (#72). What's new

A new look, clearer memberships, native Wayland new in 0.10.7

Forge Terminal is the new look for new installs: Tokyo Night colours and menus grouped by task, with the ZBrush-style layout one click away (updates keep your layout until you choose). Clearer memberships (a vote for Supporters; daily drops and preview builds for Insiders; Studio for your whole company), full alphas on custom brushes at Focal Shift -100 (#75), native Wayland on Linux and a built-in 15M/33M benchmark. What's new

PBR texturing, quad-safe Smooth, backface culling new in 0.10.6

PBR texturing in the viewport: live Mesh Maps that re-bake as you sculpt, Fill layers and Material Recipes. Smooth keeps quad topology after Quad Remesh, Keep Masked works on real voxel remeshes, and there's backface culling, a crosshair cursor and a right-button pie option. Also fixed: tablet mouse mode drifting from the system cursor, safer glTF import and an intermittent Fill layers crash. What's new

UV Editor, selection sets, radial symmetry new in 0.10.5

A full UV Editor (Alt+U): UDIM tiles, seams, six unwraps, packing, texel density and trim sheets, with stretch shown live on the model and paint that follows new UVs. Store as many selection sets per Part as you like (mask, groups, visibility, vertex paint, UVs and shape), restore them at any level and morph back toward them with the new Morph brush. Sculpt with radial and local symmetry, start strokes off the model (Shift+L), and find the timeline at the top. Also fixed: the viewport on some Windows PCs. What's new

Your own meshes, Keep Masked, pie menus new in 0.10.4

Insert your own mesh (a Part or an OBJ, PLY or GLB) by dragging on the model. Keep Masked remeshes everything but the masked detail. Hold T or Y for pie menus, swap meshes with Maya through a folder, switch the interface to Spanish, and sculpt with twelve new alphas and six VDM brushes. What's new

Alternate smooth, better masking new in 0.10.3

Let go of Shift mid-stroke to smooth without losing volume, as in ZBrush. Ctrl+drag draws a mask rectangle, Lasso and Rectangle masks follow symmetry, pen tablets in mouse mode stop jumping, and the axis gizmo snaps views. Plus Part thumbnails and Undo / Redo on the shelf. What's new

Quad Remesh 2, Kelvinlet brushes new in 0.10.2

Quad Remesh 2 is the new default quad remesher: two to fifty times fewer poles at the same accuracy, edge loops that follow the forms and exact symmetry. Kelvinlet brushes move the surface like elastic clay, and Capture from view turns any detail into an alpha or a vector displacement brush. Also a security fix for video export file names: please update. What's new

Hundreds of millions of polygons, material painting new in 0.10

Micro levels sculpt about a billion triangles in under 2 GB of memory. Paint roughness, metal, normal and height alongside colour and export maps for Unreal, Unity, glTF and Godot. Scrub back through every stroke in the Sculpt Timeline, run Help > Benchmark on your own machine, and get Maya navigation, focal length and more primitives. What's new

Faster big brushes, right-click Quick Menu new in 0.9.7

On a 21-million-triangle model a 200-pixel brush now takes a third less time per frame, trails the pen by about half as far and no longer pauses when you lift it. A right click opens the Quick Menu as in ZBrush, dynamic topology with symmetry remeshes both sides of a Quad Remeshed head, and the orthographic view shades correctly. What's new

Extract, Mirror And Weld, a Flatpak new in 0.9.6

Mask part of a sculpt and Extract it as a shell for a helmet, a strap or armour; Mirror And Weld makes one side match the other in a single watertight mesh. Divide no longer crashes on models from Blender, fast strokes on dense meshes keep their curve, and Linux users can install the Flatpak. What's new

Forge Spheres, Blender keys, Lit Spheres, SpaceMouse new in 0.9.5

Block out a body or creature from connected spheres, as in ZBrush, then Make Mesh turns it into an all-quad Part to sculpt. Blender users get Blender's navigation and Sculpt Mode keys (and can import their own keymap). Load your own lit spheres, switch to flat shading, steer the view with a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse (experimental), and enjoy an app that sits at 0% GPU when idle. Forge Spheres · What's new

Soft Clay everywhere, AppImages that update new in 0.9.4

FBX and USD exports without a material of their own, and splats made from an unpainted sculpt, use the Soft Clay grey instead of the old peach. The Linux AppImages are now named SculptForge-0.9.4-x86_64.AppImage (and -aarch64) and update themselves with AppImageUpdate. What's new

A cleaner look new in 0.9.3

The new default material, Soft Clay, is matte with a clear light and shadow side, so every stroke reads at a glance. Orange now marks only the tool you're using, and every brush has its own icon. See the screenshots

Your shelf, your size new in 0.9.3

Bigger brush tiles on the bottom shelf. Right-click a brush and choose Tile size: Small, Medium or Large. Plus File > Export STL for 3D printing, and one-command install on a Mac: brew install --cask islandmed/tap/sculptforge. The bottom shelf

Your phone is the scanner new in 0.9

Scan the QR code in File > Capture from phone, walk round an object for half a minute, and the Gaussian splat trains on your own graphics card, sharpening in the viewport while you orbit. No app, no account. Phone capture · Scan to splat

Make sculptable new in 0.9

One click turns a scan into a watertight quad mesh with its colours, with edge loops round the eyes and mouth when it's a head: a production asset, not a point cloud. From scan to sculptable

Facial shapes in one click new in 0.9

Generate the 52 ARKit blend shapes on any sculpted head, fitted to its proportions, then fix them by sculpting. They export with their names to GLB, USD, FBX and Blender. Facial shapes

Drive the face live, see it on your desk new in 0.9

Point your phone at your face and the character makes your expressions in real time; record takes and bake them to animation. View in AR stands your sculpt on your real desk. How it works

Bring your ZTools over new in 0.8.1

A free plug-in for ZBrush converts a ZTool once, then SculptForge opens the .ZTL with every SubTool as a Part, face groups, vertex paint, mask and UVs. Plus faster texture painting and ZBrush's Ctrl mask brushes. How it works

Dynamic topology new in 0.8

Turn on Dynamic and the brush adds triangles where it needs detail and removes them where it doesn't, like ZBrush's Sculptris Pro: pull a sphere into horns or fingers without stretching, with mirrored triangles under symmetry. How it works

Vector displacement brushes new in 0.8

One drag stamps a whole shape with overhangs: horns that lean, ears that curl, scales that overlap. Make your own from a VDM plane, or use the EXRs Blender makes. VDM brushes

Quad Remesh Guides new in 0.8

Draw curves on the model and Quad Remesh's edge loops follow them, round the eyes and the mouth. Sculpt layers now work on every subdivision level too. Retopology

ZBrush-style keys new in 0.7

With the ZBrush-style keymap, S, U, I and O open Draw Size, Intensity, RGB Intensity and Falloff under the cursor, Space opens the Quick Menu, and B C B, B D S, B M V pick brushes. Coming from ZBrush

Works with Blender new in 0.7

A free add-on sends the selected objects to SculptForge in one click, and one click sends them back into the same objects with transforms, UVs, colours, mask and face sets. How it works

Familiar gestures new in 0.7

Ctrl+click blurs the mask and Ctrl+Alt+click sharpens it, Shift mid-stroke draws a straight line, Falloff shapes the brush edge, and Smooth keeps its own strength. Each is a preference.

Half the memory new in 0.6

A 33 million triangle sculpt with all its subdivision levels fits in 3.4 GB instead of 5.6, and Divide is limited only by your memory: past 100 million triangles on a 32 GB laptop.

A view twice as fast new in 0.6

Only what you can see is drawn. A 33 million triangle model turns at 109 fps with 4x antialiasing and 270 fps with Fast Navigation, on a laptop's integrated graphics.

Quicker brushes on huge meshes new in 0.6

A medium dab on 33 million triangles takes about 7.5 ms, big brushes about 45 ms, and masking and painting are about twice as fast. Opening a big project is twice as fast too.

Prints at the right size new in 0.6

STL export is in millimetres with Z up, as slicers expect, with a print height option. Downloaded print models open upright and at their real size.

Update notifications new in 0.6

A small banner tells you when a new version is out, with what's in it. One small file once a day, nothing about you is sent, and one switch turns it off.

Subdivision levels new in 0.5

Divide, then step down for big forms and back up for detail, like ZBrush's SDiv. Changes at a low level carry up to the detail; Reconstruct Subdiv and Del Lower / Higher are there too.

Quad Remesh and Project All new in 0.5

Turn any sculpt into clean quads with edge loops that follow the forms, near a target count, then project the sculpted detail and vertex paint back onto the divided quads.

Map baking new in 0.5

Bake normal, displacement, AO, cavity and colour maps from the high-poly to the low-poly with MikkTSpace tangents, preview them in the viewport and send them to Unreal.

Gizmo new in 0.5

W, E and R move, scale and rotate a Part or just its unmasked part, with soft falloff for posing limbs. All Parts moves every Part at once.

Texture painting on UVs new in 0.4.2

Paint into a 1K to 8K texture instead of the vertices, so colour detail no longer depends on the mesh. Auto UV unwraps any sculpt, paint layers work on textures, and exports carry the texture.

Navigation styles

Free rotation that rolls over the top, Shift to snap to front, side or top views, and Alt+drag then release Alt to zoom, as ZBrush users expect, or Blender and Maya navigation. Prefer an upright turntable? It's one setting away.

Lasso and rectangle masking

Mask Lasso and Mask Rectangle: Ctrl+drag a shape to mask what's inside, Ctrl+Alt to unmask. Select Lasso isolates or hides any free-hand area with Ctrl+Shift.

Paint layers with blend modes

Photoshop-style vertex paint layers: Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light and more, each with its own opacity, lock and visibility.

Quads stay quads

Models from ZBrush, OBJ, FBX or USD keep their quads in the wireframe and on export. Subdivide makes quads, and voxel remesh gives an even quad grid.

Everything a sculptor needs, nothing in the way

A focused sculpting app that starts instantly, works offline and fits straight into VFX, animation and game pipelines.

Sculpt the way you already do

Fourteen brushes including Clay Block, Sharp Crease, Tendril, Trim and Move, with alphas, Lazy Stroke, symmetry, tablet pressure, ZBrush, Blender and Maya-style navigation, subdivision and voxel remesh.

Masking and face groups

Hold Ctrl to paint a mask or drag a lasso or rectangle, mask by cavity, and grow, shrink or blur it. Auto-group by angle or by piece, then Ctrl+Shift+click to isolate a group and work on just that part.

Parts

Keep the body, eyes, teeth and armour as separate meshes. Append, split, merge and solo them, Alt+click to pick one, and export each as its own object to glTF, FBX, USD or straight back to ZBrush.

Vertex paint, layers and lit spheres

Paint colour straight onto the sculpt in layers with blend modes, tint the cavities, and judge forms under the Sculpt, Red Wax, Clay, Skin, Bronze, Chrome or White materials.

Works with Blender

Keep Blender for the scene and sculpt here: the free add-on sends the selected objects to SculptForge in one click, and one click sends them back into the same objects, with transforms, materials and modifiers kept. Get the add-on · how it works

Works with ZBrush

Open and save .GoZ files with face groups, masks, UVs and vertex paint, and send models to and from ZBrush on Windows and macOS. Project files keep everything, with autosave and crash recovery.

Brush Lab: describe a brush

"Dry cracked mud." "Overlapping dragon scales." An AI turns words into a brush you can tweak with sliders. Share it with a brush code, a studio folder or the community gallery.

Generate 3D from an image or text

Reconstruct a full, sculptable model from a sketch, a piece of concept art or a description, for free through Hunyuan3D, TRELLIS.2 and Stable Fast 3D on Hugging Face, on your own ComfyUI, or with fal.ai or Meshy.

Game & animation ready

Sculpt layers become blend shapes and morph targets, and a whole LOD chain is one click. Export FBX, glTF, OpenUSD, OBJ and PLY, checked with the Khronos and OpenUSD validators.

Send to Unreal

One click imports or updates your asset in a running Unreal Editor, on this computer or another one on your network. Static meshes come with LODs, skeletal meshes with morph targets.

Gaussian splats

Load phone captures as a sculpting reference, turn them into watertight meshes, or turn your sculpt into splats. Supports PLY, .splat, glTF KHR_gaussian_splatting and OpenUSD.

Works with ComfyUI

Run any ComfyUI workflow on your own GPU or studio server to generate models straight into SculptForge, and use SculptForge's remesh, LOD and USD/FBX export nodes inside ComfyUI graphs.

Scriptable, and agent-ready

sculptforge-cli runs any operation headless for build farms. Its built-in MCP server lets Claude Code, Claude Desktop or any MCP client sculpt, convert and export.

VFX Reference Platform CY2026 · CY2027

Built for VFX and animation pipelines

SculptForge follows the VFX Reference Platform and is built and tested in its reference environments on every commit. There's no licence server, no seats and no accounts, and every editor action is scriptable from Python or the command line.

CY2026 · CY2027VFX Reference Platform builds in every release

Rocky Linux 8 & 9glibc 2.28 / 2.34, verified in CI

GCC 14.2 · C++20gcc-toolset-14, as the platform specifies

Python 3.13import sculptforge with NumPy mesh access

OpenUSD in and out

USDA and USDZ, with each Part as its own Mesh prim and sculpt layers as UsdSkel blend shapes. Exports are checked with OpenUSD's usdchecker.
Rez package

rez-build --install puts the app and CLI on PATH and the Python module on PYTHONPATH.
Headless and farm-ready

sculptforge-cli runs every operation without a display: remesh, decimate, LODs, USD, FBX and glTF export. Turntables and review images render offscreen.
No conflicts with your stack

No Qt, Boost, TBB or OpenEXR to clash with the versions your other tools load. The few dependencies are linked statically.
Native Wayland on Linux

No XWayland: a native Wayland window, sharp at any scale (fractional too), with pen pressure through the Wayland tablet protocol. X11 works just as well.
Nothing phones home

No licence server, telemetry or account. It runs on air-gapped workstations and farm nodes.
Make it yours

GPL-3.0: fork it and wire it into your asset system. In-house changes can stay in-house; you only share source if you distribute a modified version outside your organisation.

# Python 3.13, inside your pipeline
import sculptforge as sf

doc = sf.Document()
sf.run(doc, "open", path="/show/troll/troll_base.fbx")
sf.run(doc, "remesh", resolution=320)
sf.run(doc, "export_usd", path="/show/troll/troll_sculpt.usda")
verts = doc.vertices            # NumPy (N, 3) float32

# Deploy with Rez, run anywhere on the farm
rez-build --install
rez-env sculptforge -- sculptforge-cli -c \
  'open path=troll.fbx; export_lods path=troll.glb levels=4'
rez-env sculptforge -- sculptforge troll.usda \
  --render review.png --turntable 8

Read the studio guide VFX builds

See it in action

Every clip is a real, unedited recording of the app, made with its built-in demo recorder. Waits for AI models are sped up and labelled on screen.

Brush Lab: the AI brush creator

Type "dry cracked mud", and AI designs the brush. Then ask for "deeper cracks, sharper edges". It's free out of the box with no key. This clip uses a small open model running on the same machine, so nothing leaves the computer.

From a sketch to a sculptable model in about 20 seconds

One concept sketch became a full 3D owl knight, with shields, belt and pouches, a back and real depth. It was made with the free Hunyuan3D 2.1 model, then voxel-remeshed into one clean surface ready to sculpt. The wait is sped up in the clip and labelled. You can also type a description instead of using an image.

Blend shapes, LODs and Unreal

Sculpt a snarl on its own layer and play it back. Generate a LOD chain in one click: even the 5,000-triangle level keeps the expression. Then send a skeletal mesh with LODs and morph targets straight to Unreal Engine.

Gaussian splats, both ways

Turn a sculpt into Gaussian splats for web viewers and engines, and turn splat captures into watertight meshes in under a second.

Free AI built in, or bring your own

Two AI tools work out of the box at no cost and with no sign-up. Every AI feature is optional and talks directly to the service you pick. SculptForge has no servers, no account and no telemetry.

Brush Lab, the AI brush creator: describe a brush ("dry cracked mud", "overlapping dragon scales"), and AI builds it as a recipe with every value on a slider. Then refine it in plain words. Free through an open model on Pollinations.ai, no key needed.
Generate 3D: turn a sketch, concept art or a sentence into a full model you can sculpt, free through Hunyuan3D, TRELLIS.2 and Stable Fast 3D on Hugging Face.
Local models (Ollama, LM Studio) for brush design. They're free, private and work offline. Set one up in five minutes on Windows, macOS or Linux.
Your own ComfyUI (local or a studio GPU server) runs any image or text to 3D workflow, with ready-made Hunyuan3D 2.1 workflows included. ComfyUI guide.
Bring your own Claude, fal.ai or Meshy key when you want more speed or capacity.

Each model has its own licence. For example, Tencent's Hunyuan3D isn't licensed for use in the EU, UK or South Korea. See the AI services and privacy guide.

How it compares

	SculptForge	ZBrush	Mudbox	Blender	Nomad
Price	Free	Subscription	Subscription (sales end Nov 2026)	Free	Paid
Built for sculpting	Yes	Yes	Yes	General 3D suite	Yes (mobile first)
Actively developed	Yes	Yes	No (being retired)	Yes	Yes
Open source	GPL	No	No	GPL	No
Native Linux	Yes	No	RHEL / Rocky	Yes	No
Send to Unreal	Built in	Plugin	No (FBX export)	Add-on	No
Image / text to 3D	Built in	No	No	Add-ons	No
Gaussian splats	Built in	No	No	Add-ons	No
AI agent control (MCP)	Built in	No	No	Add-ons	No
VFX Reference Platform builds	CY2026/27	No	Not stated	Yes	No

Other products' columns: as of November 2026, from each product's public pages; tell us if something changed.

SculptForge is young: UDIMs, Ptex and separate texture channels aren't there yet. See the roadmap.

Download

Version 0.10.8. All builds come from the latest GitHub release, with SHA-256 checksums. Free forever; memberships add credits, a monthly brush pack and a roadmap vote.

Windows10 / 11 · installer (.exe) macOS11+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · .dmg Ubuntu / Debian.deb · x86_64 (ARM64: see all downloads) Fedora / RHEL 9+.rpm · x86_64 (ARM64: see all downloads) Any LinuxAppImage · x86_64, runs anywhere Blender add-onBlender 4.2+ · send to SculptForge and back Arch LinuxPKGBUILD · makepkg -si VFX Reference PlatformCY2026 (Rocky 8) & CY2027 (Rocky 9) · .tar.gz with Python module Rezpackaging/rez · build and install your own package

Each button downloads the newest version. All downloads (ARM64, portable .zip, one-command install) · on macOS also brew install --cask islandmed/tap/sculptforge · older versions.

The builds aren't code-signed yet. On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open the first time. On Windows, if SmartScreen appears, choose More info → Run anyway. You can also build from source.

Questions

Is it really free? Can I sell what I make?

Yes. SculptForge is free under the GPL-3.0, and you own everything you sculpt with it. The GPL covers the program's source code, not your models. If you use an AI model to generate a starting point, that model's licence also applies (see the AI services guide).

Do I need AI to use it?

No. Sculpting, layers, LODs, remeshing, file formats and Send to Unreal all work offline with no AI at all. The AI tools are extras you can switch to a local model or simply ignore.

Which Unreal versions work with Send to Unreal?

It targets Unreal Engine 5. It uses Unreal's built-in Python remote execution, so you only enable the Python plugin and tick "Enable Remote Execution"; there's nothing to install in your project. You can always export an Unreal-ready FBX instead.

Can SculptForge replace ZBrush for me?

For many sculpting and game-asset jobs, yes. Blocking out, sculpting forms and detail, blend shapes, LODs and getting assets into Unreal, glTF or USD all work today, with familiar brushes and controls. Masking, face groups and hide/show, vertex paint, lit spheres, project files and Send to ZBrush (GoZ-compatible exchange) exchange with ZBrush work too, with a ZBrush-style keymap for ZBrush users. Subdivision levels, dynamic topology, Quad Remesh retopology with guides, UVs and vector displacement brushes are in too. It can't read ZBrush's .ZTL files directly: use Send to ZBrush, or convert your ZTools once with the free SculptForge ZTL Export plug-in for ZBrush. It's an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Maxon.

Mudbox is being retired. Can SculptForge replace it?

For sculpting, largely yes. Autodesk ends new Mudbox subscription sales on 7 November 2026 and says it has had no significant feature enhancements since Mudbox 2019 (Autodesk's notice). SculptForge is free, open source, actively developed and runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux (including RHEL and Rocky). It opens OBJ, FBX, glTF and USD exported from Mudbox, and has layers, masking, vertex paint and Send to Unreal. It also has what Mudbox users rely on: subdivision levels, sculpt layers, texture painting with paint layers and blend modes, normal and displacement baking, and quad retopology. It doesn't have UDIMs, Ptex or separate texture channels yet. SculptForge for Mudbox users. It's an independent project, not affiliated with Autodesk.

Does it fit a VFX studio pipeline?

Yes. Every release includes VFX Reference Platform CY2026 and CY2027 builds (Rocky Linux 8 and 9, GCC 14.2, Python 3.13), there's a Rez package, and everything the app does can be scripted from Python or the headless CLI. It reads and writes OpenUSD (USDA/USDZ), FBX and glTF. Binary .usdc, USD references and OpenColorIO aren't supported yet. See the studio guide.

How can I help?

Try it, report bugs, share brushes, and send pull requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Sculpt it. Forge it.Ship it.