SculptForge Files

Added

• Fast Big Brushes (Experimental) (Preferences > Performance, off by default): a dab that reaches more than 150,000 vertices takes its plane from an even sample of them and turns the shading along with the move it makes (from the brush's own slope, no neighbour walks), and the dabs waiting for a frame go through the vertices together in one pass, so the normals, the picking structure and the GPU copy are updated once a frame instead of once a dab. Every vertex still moves by the brush itself; the exact shading follows behind the brush and when the pen lifts. Standard, Clay, Flatten, Crease, Pinch and Sharp Crease; Trim takes the sampled plane and shading but not the fused pass. Small brushes, Smooth, Layer, Inflate, Nudge, Clay Block, alphas and masked areas are placed dab by dab as before. The result matches the dab-by-dab stroke to within about 2% of how far it moved the surface (tests/test_beta_boost.cpp).
• Brush packs: 60 built-in brushes in six packs (Clay & Form, Hard Surface, Organic & Skin, Cloth & Folds, Damage & Wear, Ornament), made from SculptForge's own recipe engine and procedural alphas. A pack brush picked the first time brings its alpha (and turns it along the stroke where that helps). Guide chapter Brush packs.
• Six new procedural alphas: Cobblestone, Leather Grain, Hex Plates, Knit, Bolt and Chips (21 built-in alphas in all).
• Sort menu on the brush grid and list, the Alpha palette, the Material picker and the Library: A-Z (the default), Recent, and Pack (brushes, alphas). Saved in the preferences. The Alpha palette gets a filter field.
• Mask by peaks, Mask by colour and Mask by facing (mask_by_peaks, mask_by_color, mask_by_facing), and brush_use name=... to pick a library or pack brush from scripts and macros.
• Brush recipes (.sfbrush, brush codes) may name a built-in alpha and alphaFollow; older files are unchanged.
• Quick tour (Help > Quick tour, the welcome, and once when the Classic sculpting keys are picked): ten slides with pictures of SculptForge; Show me opens and flashes the panel while the tour waits in a bar at the bottom. The last slide is about memberships; Maybe later closes it for good. Guide chapter Quick tour for experienced sculptors (replaces the old comparison chapter).
• Experimental toggles in Preferences > Performance, all off by default. Live Move: the GPU draws a Move drag from the grab's start positions and the whole move is applied once at pen lift (one grab, equal to the per-frame grabs to 1e-6). It falls back to the normal Move with masks, hidden faces, sculpt layers, micro levels, Connected Only or View falloff (SF_LIVE_MOVE=0/1). Background Preview: the predictive preview is drawn for background dabs (meshes of 2M+ vertices), and the frame no longer waits for a batch; the solver's dabs are unchanged (SF_BG_GHOST=0/1). Fast Upload: stroke uploads are packed into persistently mapped staging buffers (GL_ARB_buffer_storage) and copied on the GPU (SF_PERSISTENT_UPLOAD=0/1). The research behind them, including a design for focus detail on billion-polygon assets, is in docs/design/perf-moonshots.md.
• Cmd+, / Ctrl+, opens Preferences (#111, suggested by fenixpoints).
• Show SculptForge on Discord (Preferences > Integrations, off by default; idea by ebarranco): Discord shows SculptForge, its icon and the elapsed time; optionally "Monthly challenge: <theme>" (typed, 64 characters at most) and the file's name (never its folder). Nothing else is sent. It talks only to the Discord app on the same computer through Discord's local connection (no network connection, no port, no sign-in), sends its status and nothing else, and ignores whatever Discord sends back. See the guide's "Show SculptForge on Discord".

Changed

• Tool > Masking is one panel of buttons with pictures and a hint each: Shapes, Mask by and Adjust, with their options under Mask by options.
• Brushes, alphas, materials and Library files list A-Z by default (alphas and materials were in a fixed order; Library projects were newest first, which is still one click away under Sort: Recent).
• The command search (F3) finds features by plain sculpting words: remesh, voxel, retopo, quads, multires, groups, clip, trim, slice, folders, insert, kitbash, vertex color ("Quad Remesh (also: retopo)").
• Scripts, commands and file names use SculptForge's own names throughout (part_*, forgesphere_*, bridge_*, facegroup_*, load_litsphere, library_open, layout=classic, input_style classic, the --facegroups flag, the SCULPTFORGE_LITSPHERE_PATH variable). Scripts, macros, keymaps, radial menus, packs, projects and preferences from older versions still load: their old names are read once and mapped to the new ones. The old command-line flag and environment variable names are no longer read.
• Micro levels on slower computers: while a stroke runs, the shading of what it changed takes at most about 10 ms a frame (measured on the computer), so big strokes keep up with the pen; the rest of the shading follows right after, as before.

Removed

• The library export plug-in for another sculpting app and opening its library files through it. A folder of numbered Bridge files still opens as one scene.

Fixed

• Pattern brushes on micro levels (#120, reported by RodTDai): a brush recipe on a micro level was a plain Standard dab, without its surface pattern (Dragon Scales, Skin Pores, Cracks...) and building up even when the recipe carves. It now keeps the pattern and its depth's sign there; planes, pinch and drag still don't apply to micro levels.
• Windows portable zip starts on a fresh PC (#109, reported by git-tiger): the Visual C++ runtime (msvcp140, vcruntime140, vcruntime140_1) now ships next to sculptforge.exe in the zip and the installer; before, a PC without the Visual C++ Redistributable couldn't start it. When SculptForge can't start (no OpenGL 3.3, an old graphics driver) it now says why in a message box, with the log's path, instead of quietly exiting.
• Move with Pressure > Size on a pen (#122, reported by Zoldyck-Kill): Move and the Kelvinlet grab brushes set the area they grab at the press, when a pen barely touches, so with Pressure > Size on they grabbed only a few percent of the brush and seemed not to work. They now always grab with the full brush size; Pressure > Strength still applies.

Downloads

New here? install/ explains which file to pick, or install with one command: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/islandmed/SculptForge/main/install/install.sh | sh (macOS / Linux), irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/islandmed/SculptForge/main/install/install.ps1 | iex (Windows PowerShell). Each file is also attached without its version number (e.g. SculptForge-macos.dmg) so links to releases/latest/download/... always get the newest build.

The builds are not code-signed yet. macOS: right-click the app → Open the first time. Windows: if SmartScreen appears, choose More info → Run anyway. Checksums are in SHA256SUMS.txt.