SculptForge Files

Shaped by feedback from a working ZBrush modeler and a survey of ZBrush and Mudbox forums.

Feels like ZBrush

• Free rotation by default: the model follows the cursor and can roll over the top, as in ZBrush. Hold Shift while rotating to snap to the nearest front, side, top or bottom view. Preferences > Interface > Rotation: Turntable keeps the model upright (Blender / Maya style).
• Alt+drag pans and letting go of Alt mid-drag zooms; right-drag follows ZBrush's right-click navigation (Alt pans, Ctrl zooms, Shift snaps). Projects remember the view's roll.
• MaskLasso and MaskRect (Tool > Masking): Ctrl+drag a lasso or rectangle to mask what's inside, Ctrl+Alt to unmask, starting on the model or the background.
• SelectLasso (Tool > Visibility): Ctrl+Shift+drag a free-hand lasso to keep what's inside (Alt: hide it), alongside SelectRect. New script commands mask_rect, mask_lasso and hide_lasso.
• New Sculpt material, the default: neutral clay under a strong key light with crisp highlights and deep cavity shading, so small strokes stay readable. Projects keep the material they were saved with.

Quads

• Models opened from ZBrush (GoZ), OBJ, FBX, PLY or USD keep their quads: PolyF shows them as quads and OBJ / FBX / PLY / USD / GoZ export writes them back as quads, through sculpting, layers, undo, SubTools and projects.
• Subdivide turns each quad into four quads, voxel remesh produces an even quad grid (like DynaMesh), and the Plane and Cube primitives are quads. Decimate still produces triangles.

Paint layers

• Photoshop-style polypaint layers per SubTool (Tool > Paint Layers): name, visibility, opacity, lock and ten blend modes (Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, Add, ...). Painting is non-destructive and undoable; merge down, flatten, duplicate and reorder work as in Photoshop. Something ZBrush never had.
• Exports use the composited colours; projects keep the layers (older versions open them flattened). New paint_layer_* script commands.

Documentation

• What's New: a new user-guide chapter listing what changed in each version, under Help > What's New. It opens by itself the first time a new version starts. The website shows "What's new in 0.4" up front.
• The guide, glossary, roadmap and install chapter cover everything above, with direct download links.

Install

• install/: direct download links that always get the newest build, what to do after downloading, and one-command installers (install.sh for macOS / Linux, install.ps1 for Windows) that verify checksums. Releases also carry version-less copies of each file (e.g. SculptForge-macos.dmg).

Development

• Windows testing: tools/wintest.sh cross-compiles for Windows and runs every test under Wine; CI now runs the UI tests on Windows too (Mesa's software OpenGL). Release builds run the UI tests under Xvfb.

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.