SculptForge

Welcome to SculptForge

SculptForge is a free, open-source digital sculpting application for VFX, animation and games. This chapter explains what it is, what it can and can't do yet, and how the rest of this guide is organised.

What SculptForge is#

SculptForge is a focused sculpting tool with the brushes, symmetry, masking and navigation that ZBrush artists already know, built around a ZBrush-style interface: shelves around a canvas, alphabetical palettes that hold every function, a LightBox of thumbnails and pop-up pickers. It runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux, starts in a moment, works offline and costs nothing. ZBrush's keys and gestures work out of the box: see Coming from ZBrush. There is no account, no subscription, no licence server and no telemetry.

It is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. You own everything you make with it: the GPL covers the program, not your models.

What you can do with it#

  • Sculpt with fourteen built-in brushes (Standard, Clay, Clay Buildup, Dam Standard, Move, Smooth, Inflate, Pinch, Flatten, Crease, Trim, Snake Hook, Layer and Nudge), four stroke types, brush alphas, X/Y/Z symmetry and tablet pressure. See Sculpting and brushes.
  • Design brushes in words with Brush Lab: describe "dry cracked mud" and an AI builds a brush recipe you can tweak with sliders, keep in your library and share as a file or a one-line brush code. See Brush Lab and sharing brushes.
  • Mask, group and hide parts of the model the ZBrush way: Ctrl to paint a mask, Ctrl+Shift to isolate a polygroup. See Masking and Polygroups and visibility.
  • Keep separate meshes as SubTools (body, eyes, teeth, armour), each with its own undo history. See SubTools.
  • Paint colour on the surface (polypaint) and look at the model through seven MatCap materials. See Polypaint and materials.
  • Sculpt layers that double as blend shapes (morph targets), with live weights. See Sculpt layers and blend shapes.
  • Rebuild the mesh: Loop subdivision, voxel remesh (similar to DynaMesh), decimation and one-click LOD chains. See Subdivide, remesh, decimate and LODs.
  • Generate a model from a sketch, concept art or a description, free through Hugging Face or on your own ComfyUI server. See Image and text to 3D.
  • Work with Gaussian splats from phone captures: sculpt against them or turn them into meshes. See Gaussian splats.
  • Export to glTF/GLB, FBX, OpenUSD, OBJ, STL and PLY, send models straight into Unreal Engine, and exchange them with ZBrush through GoZ. See Exporting, Unreal and ZBrush.
  • Automate everything: every action is a command you can type in the console, run headless with sculptforge-cli, script from Python or hand to an AI agent over MCP. See Scripting and automation.

What it doesn't do yet#

SculptForge is young (version 0.8; see What's new). Some things ZBrush artists rely on are still on the roadmap:

  • QRemesh curve guides.
  • UV editing (seams, relax) and UDIM tiles.
  • Booleans and stencils.

Others are not on the roadmap: ZSpheres, ZModeler, the 2.5D canvas, and reading ZBrush's own .ZTL and .ZPR files directly (bring models over with GoZ, the ZTool Export plug-in for ZBrush, or as OBJ, FBX or GLB).

Coming from ZBrush#

Most habits carry over. You sculpt with a left drag, hold Alt to subtract and Shift to smooth, drag on the background to rotate, Alt+drag to pan, and hold Ctrl to mask. The palettes have the names you expect (Alpha, Brush, Stroke, Tool, Transform...), the Tool palette holds the SubTool, Masking and Polygroups sub-palettes, B opens the brush pop-up with the same letter keys (B, S, T picks Standard), , opens the LightBox and Ctrl+Shift+I stores your interface, and S U I O, Space, Ctrl+W and the mask keys do what your hands expect. Coming from ZBrush lists what is the same, what differs and every shortcut side by side; the Glossary maps ZBrush terms to SculptForge ones.

How this guide is organised#

Inside SculptForge, Help > User Guide opens this guide in its own window with a table of contents, search and links between chapters. Two other kinds of help are always a keystroke away:

  • Hold Ctrl and point at any button, slider or tile to see what it does, its shortcut and the script command behind it.
  • Press F1 for the Controls sheet (every shortcut and mouse gesture) or F3 to search for any command by name.

Getting help and reporting problems#

Help > Report a problem opens the issue tracker on GitHub (github.com/islandmed/SculptForge/issues). Include your operating system, your graphics card and what you did just before the problem; see Troubleshooting and FAQ for what else helps. Help > Website & documentation opens the SculptForge website.

See also#

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