The free, open-source alternative to ZBrush and Mudbox
Digital sculpting for VFX, animation and game studios on Linux, macOS and Windows: the brushes, symmetry and navigation ZBrush artists already know, with 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.
ZBrush-style sculpting for VFX, animation and games, with VFX Reference Platform builds, OpenUSD and Python, plus free built-in AI: an AI brush creator and sketch to 3D.
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
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
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
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
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
A free plug-in for ZBrush converts a ZTool once, then SculptForge opens the .ZTL with every SubTool, polygroups, polypaint, mask and UVs. Plus faster texture painting and ZBrush's Ctrl mask brushes. How it works
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
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
Draw curves on the model and QRemesh's edge loops follow them, round the eyes and the mouth. Sculpt layers now work on every subdivision level too. Retopology
S, U, I and O open Draw Size, Z Intensity, RGB Intensity and Focal Shift under the cursor, Space opens the QuickMenu, and B C B, B D S, B M V pick brushes as in ZBrush. Coming from ZBrush
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
Ctrl+click blurs the mask and Ctrl+Alt+click sharpens it, Shift mid-stroke draws a straight line, Focal Shift shapes the falloff, and Smooth keeps its own strength. The old keys are one setting away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Turn any sculpt into clean quads with edge loops that follow the forms, near a target count, then project the sculpted detail and polypaint back onto the divided quads.
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.
W, E and R move, scale and rotate a SubTool or just its unmasked part, with soft falloff for posing limbs. Transpose All moves every SubTool at once.
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.
Free rotation that rolls over the top, Shift to snap to front, side or top views, and Alt+drag then release Alt to zoom. Prefer an upright turntable? It's one setting away.
MaskLasso and MaskRect: Ctrl+drag a shape to mask what's inside, Ctrl+Alt to unmask. SelectLasso isolates or hides any free-hand area with Ctrl+Shift.
Photoshop-style polypaint layers: Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light and more, each with its own opacity, lock and visibility. Something ZBrush has never had.
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.
A focused sculpting app that starts instantly, works offline and fits straight into VFX, animation and game pipelines.
Fourteen brushes including Clay Buildup, Dam Standard, Snake Hook, Trim and Move, with alphas, lazy mouse, symmetry, tablet pressure, ZBrush-style navigation, subdivision and voxel remesh.
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.
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.
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.
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
Open and save GoZ files with polygroups, masks, UVs and polypaint, and send models to and from ZBrush on Windows and macOS. Project files keep everything, with autosave and crash recovery.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
import sculptforge with NumPy mesh accessUSDA and USDZ, with each SubTool as its own Mesh prim and sculpt layers as UsdSkel blend shapes.
Exports are checked with OpenUSD's usdchecker.
rez-build --install puts the app and CLI on PATH and the Python module on
PYTHONPATH.
sculptforge-cli runs every operation without a display: remesh, decimate, LODs, USD, FBX
and glTF export. Turntables and review images render offscreen.
No Qt, Boost, TBB or OpenEXR to clash with the versions your other tools load. The few dependencies are linked statically.
No licence server, telemetry or account. It runs on air-gapped workstations and farm nodes.
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 8Every 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.
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.
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.
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.
Turn a sculpt into Gaussian splats for web viewers and engines, and turn splat captures into watertight meshes in under a second.
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.
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.
| 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 |
SculptForge is young. It doesn't yet have retopology, UVs or texture painting. See the roadmap.
Version 0.9.0. All builds come from the latest GitHub release, with SHA-256 checksums.
yay -S sculptforgepackaging/rez · build and install your own package
Each button downloads the newest version. All downloads (ARM64, portable .zip, one-command install) · 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.
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).
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.
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.
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, polygroups and hide/show, polypaint, MatCaps, project files and GoZ exchange with ZBrush work too, with the controls ZBrush users expect. Subdivision levels, dynamic topology (like Sculptris Pro), QRemesh retopology with guides, UVs and vector displacement brushes are in too. It can't read ZBrush's .ZTL files directly: use GoZ, or convert your ZTools once with the free ZTool Export plug-in for ZBrush. It's an independent project, not affiliated with Maxon.
For sculpting, largely yes. Autodesk ends new Mudbox subscription sales on 7 November 2026, and its releases since 2019 have added no new features. 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, polypaint and Send to Unreal. Mudbox's strength was painting textures on UV-mapped models; SculptForge doesn't have UVs or texture painting yet (they're on the roadmap), and it has no multiresolution subdivision levels yet. It's an independent project, not affiliated with Autodesk.
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.
Try it, report bugs, share brushes, and send pull requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md.