SculptForge

Phone capture and AR

Your phone becomes SculptForge's camera and second screen. Scan an object by walking around it, send a photo to turn into a model, bring in a splat from a scanning app, look at your sculpt standing on your real desk in AR, and drive a character's face with your own. There is no app to install and no account: the phone's browser talks to SculptForge over your Wi-Fi.

Pair your phone#

  1. Choose File > Capture from phone (or the phone button in the LightBox's header). A window opens with a QR code.
  2. Point the phone's camera at the QR code and tap the link it shows. The capture page opens, already paired with this window: the badge at its top shows your computer's name.

The phone and the computer must be on the same Wi-Fi. If the phone has no QR scanner, open the address shown under the code in its browser and type the 6-digit pairing code.

The link works only while the window is open: closing it stops SculptForge listening, and the next time you open it there is a new code. A code nobody uses expires after 10 minutes.

"This site can't be reached" on Android#

Recent versions of Chrome on Android can refuse to open any address on your home network, even your router's, and show This site can't be reached (under Details: ERR_TOO_MANY_RETRIES). Until SculptForge's capture page moves to the website, the simplest fix is to use Firefox on the phone: install it from the Play Store, open the address shown under the QR code (for example http://10.0.0.117:8765), allow it to reach devices on your local network when it asks, and type the 6-digit code. Firefox can also be set as the phone's default browser so the camera's QR links open there.

Linux firewall#

Many Linux desktops (Omarchy, Ubuntu with ufw enabled, Fedora with firewalld) block incoming connections, so the phone's request never arrives. Allow SculptForge's port from your home network only, for example with ufw:

sudo ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/24 to any port 8765 proto tcp comment 'SculptForge phone capture'

Use your own network's range (the first three numbers of the address under the QR code, then .0/24). With firewalld: sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=8765/tcp (add --permanent to keep it).

Scan an object#

Tap Scan an object, read the tips, and tap Record a video. Walk slowly all the way round the object, then once more a little lower, for 20 to 60 seconds:

  • slow and steady, no quick turns;
  • soft, even light, without hard shadows or shiny reflections;
  • the whole object in the middle of the screen, at about the same distance all the way (don't zoom).

You can also send a video you already took, or 20 to 200 photos (Choose photos). The page warns you when a video is very short or very long. Tap Send to SculptForge: the upload shows its progress on the phone and in SculptForge's window.

Big videos over shaky Wi-Fi are fine: the page sends them in pieces and carries on where it stopped if the connection drops. Keep the page open and the screen on until it says Sent.

What arrives is saved in your library's Captures folder (see below) and handed to splat training, which turns it into a Gaussian splat that sharpens in the viewport while it trains. See Gaussian splats.

One photo to 3D#

Tap One photo to 3D and take a photo (or choose one). One object, the whole of it in the picture, on a plain background works best. SculptForge loads it into Generate > Image to 3D and starts generating with the service chosen there (free Hugging Face models by default). Turn off Generate from a photo at once in the window to check the photo first and press Generate yourself. See Image and text to 3D.

The phone sends large photos at about 2048 pixels, which is plenty and much faster.

Send a splat file#

Already scanned it with Scaniverse, Polycam or Luma? Export a Gaussian splat .ply from the app, tap Send a splat file and choose it. It opens next to your sculpt as a splat. A .ply that is a plain mesh becomes a new SubTool instead, so it never replaces your work.

View in AR#

Tap View in AR, choose what to show (the Active SubTool or the Whole scene) and how big it should be on the desk (10 cm to 1 m), then Get the model. SculptForge prepares a phone-friendly copy: reduced to about 80,000 triangles, its polypaint or texture baked into one texture, standing on its base. When it is ready, tap View in AR and point the phone at a desk or the floor.

  • iPhone and iPad open it in AR Quick Look (a USDZ file).
  • Android opens it in Google's Scene Viewer (a GLB file; needs Google Play Services for AR). Download the model saves the file instead.

Keep sculpting: while the phone is looking, every few seconds after a stroke SculptForge exports the model again and the page says Updated from your sculpt. Tap View in AR again to see the change. Turn off Update after each stroke in the window to stop that.

Face capture#

Tap Face capture, then Start face capture. Your phone's front camera tracks your face with MediaPipe Face Landmarker, which runs on the phone: the video never leaves it. About 30 times a second only the 52 expression weights (the ARKit set: jawOpen, eyeBlinkLeft, mouthSmileRight...) and the head's rotation go to SculptForge.

Prop the phone up at eye level, about an arm's length away, with light on your face. The window's Face section shows a little face following yours and the frame rate.

The weights drive the character's facial shapes on the active SubTool (made with Generate facial shapes). If the character winks with the wrong eye, tick Mirror left and right.

Record face take records the feed until you press it again. Each take is saved in the Captures folder as take.jsonl: one line per frame with the 52 weights, the head rotation and the time, ready to play back or export.

The Captures folder#

Everything the phone sends is saved in your library (the folder the LightBox shows, normally Documents/SculptForge), under Captures, one folder per capture:

Captures/2026-10-26_195803-splat/scan.mov
Captures/2026-10-26_195803-splat/capture.json
Captures/2026-10-26_201544-photo/IMG_0412.jpg
Captures/2026-10-26_203012-face/take.jsonl

capture.json records the kind (splat, photo, ply or face), the device, the files and the times. The window's Received list opens a capture's folder.

Privacy and security#

  • Only devices on your local network can connect, and only while the window is open.
  • Every request needs the session's secret token (it is in the QR code) or the pairing code.
  • Uploads have size limits (4 GB a file, 8 GB a capture), file names are cleaned, and files are written only inside the Captures folder.
  • Nothing you capture is uploaded anywhere except to your computer. A photo goes on to the image-to-3D service you chose in SculptForge, as it does when you pick it yourself.

Also in the app: Help > User Guide (Shift+F1). Found a mistake? Edit this page on GitHub.