SculptForge Files

The day after launch, people filed ten issues. 0.9.5 answers all of them: ZSpheres for blocking out a base mesh, a Blender input style, flat shading, your own MatCaps, SpaceMouse navigation (experimental), an idle app that no longer keeps the graphics card busy, and fixes for pens on Windows and Linux, the S slider and the Blender Bridge. Thank you for the reports.

Added

• ZSpheres (Tool > ZSpheres, [#8]): block out a base mesh from connected spheres. Draw grows a sphere from another (the drag sets its size) or adds a joint on a link, Move and Scale set the proportions, Alt+click deletes, Symmetry mirrors every edit, Preview (A) shows the skin, and Make Mesh builds it as a new watertight quad SubTool with a polygroup per link, keeping the ZSpheres hidden to edit again. Undoable, saved in projects, and scriptable (zsphere_new, zsphere_add, zsphere_set, zsphere_delete, zsphere_insert, zsphere_preview, zsphere_make_mesh, zsphere_list).
• A Blender input style (#12): Preferences > Input > Style > Blender, also at the top of the Controls window. Middle-drag orbits, Shift+middle pans, Ctrl+middle zooms, and Alt+left-drag does the same for pens and trackpads (Emulate 3 Button Mouse); Ctrl inverts a stroke, Shift smooths; F / Shift+F set the radius and strength; Blender 4.2+'s Sculpt Mode keys pick the nearest brushes (V Draw, S Smooth, P Pinch, I Inflate, G Grab, C Clay Strips, Shift+C Crease, K Snake Hook, Shift+T Scrape as Flatten) and M the Mask brush (Ctrl+drag unmasks); Alt+M / Ctrl+I clear / invert the mask; H / Shift+H / Alt+H hide, isolate and show polygroups; Alt+1 / Alt+2 step the subdivision levels; Home frames everything. Choosing it sets Rotation to Turntable. Emulate Numpad makes the number row work as the numpad.
• Import Blender keymap...: reads a keymap exported from Blender (the .py file, as text: it is never run) and takes the 3D View and Sculpt keys SculptForge has an equivalent for. Also the blender_keymap_import command.
• Numpad views in every input style: Numpad 1 / 3 / 7 front, right, top (Ctrl: back, left, bottom), Numpad 5 orthographic, Numpad 4 / 6 / 8 / 2 orbit in 15 degree steps, Numpad 9 the other side, Numpad . frames the active SubTool, Numpad Plus / Minus zoom.

• An orthographic view. The axis views turn it on until the view is rotated again (Blender's Auto Perspective).

• Custom MatCaps (#15): Material > Load MatCap... loads a lit-sphere image (PNG, JPG or EXR; non-square images are cropped to the centre, large ones scaled to 1024) as a material and copies it into the new MatCaps folder of the library (Documents/SculptForge/MatCaps); images in that folder load at start-up and, when added later, the next time a material list opens (a cheap size and time check), and folders listed in SCULPTFORGE_MATCAP_PATH load at start-up. They show in the material picker, palette and LightBox. Right-click > Remove takes one out of the lists and moves its image to the trash (freedesktop trash on Linux, Recycle Bin on Windows; on macOS it is hidden for the session and the message says where the file is). A project using one embeds it as a PNG (an attachments entry; no format change), so it opens with the same look anywhere. Scripts: load_matcap path=..., remove_matcap name=..., set_material name=<your MatCap>.

• Smooth / Flat shading (#11): Material palette (and Tool > Display) > Shading switches the whole scene to flat, faceted shading, where every polygon shows its own face; This SubTool keeps one SubTool smooth or flat whatever the scene says. Both are saved in projects (no format change; older files open with your preferred shading) and the scene's choice is a preference (Store Config). Smooth stays the default. Scripts: set_shading mode=flat, subtool_shading mode=smooth name=Eyes.
• 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse navigation (#6, experimental): the cap's six axes pan, zoom and turn the view about the orbit pivot, continuously and at the same speed whatever the frame rate, in every input style and while a pen stroke is held. Read through SDL's joystick API (no 3Dconnexion SDK), hot-plug aware, recognised by USB id (vendor 256F, and the older Logitech-id SpaceNavigator / SpacePilot / SpaceExplorer / SpaceMouse Pro). Preferences > Input > SpaceMouse: on/off, speed, dead zone, per-axis invert, Lock rotation to turntable, Dominant axis, live axis bars, and an action per button (the two side buttons default to Frame and Front view); Store Config keeps them (spaceMouse in ui.json). Untested on real hardware; the guide explains what to do when 3DxWare (Windows, macOS) or spacenavd (Linux) holds the device. UI tests drive a virtual joystick with a SpaceMouse Compact's ids (spacemouse, spacemouse_hold, spacemouse_button, spacemouse_unplug steps).

Fixed

• The Blender Bridge add-on zip was missing zbrush_keys.py, so Blender refused to install it ("cannot import name zbrush_keys", [#10]). The zip now carries every module, and the packaging check fails if one is left out.
• Rotating, panning and zooming with the pen tip on the background only shook the view with some tablets (a Ugee M708 on Linux, [#7]): their drivers send stray mouse events between the pen's, and the view followed both. The pen now moves the view by its own motion only, and lifting the pen ends a view drag as it ends a stroke.
• The S / U / I / O slider closed as soon as you grabbed it, and could open away from the cursor (#9, seen on Windows). It now opens with its knob (the current value) right under the brush cursor, at any UI scale and with a pen, and stays open while you drag until you let go, click elsewhere or press Esc.
• B, M, S and the LightBox key followed the built-in key even after you gave the action another one.
• Pens through Windows Ink (a Wacom Intuos Pro, [#13]): taps on menus and buttons often missed, Alt+pen drag and the Move button threw the model off the canvas, and the S / U / O slider could not be dragged. Windows Ink and some drivers send mouse events of their own beside the pen's, at an old position; the interface followed them as well as the pen. While the pen is in range the interface now follows only the pen (as the canvas already did), and the Move / Zoom / Rotate buttons move the view by the cursor's own steps.
• SculptForge kept the graphics card and a little of the processor busy while it sat idle (#14): it drew a new frame 60 or more times a second whatever happened. It now draws only when something changes: your input, a stroke or view move, a background job (progress bars, splat training, the update check), a message from the phone or the Blender Bridge, or an animation. Idle, it draws nothing (measured: 120 frames a second and 8% of a processor core before, 0 frames and 0.1% after). UI tests and --record still draw every frame. sculptforge --measure-idle 5 prints the idle frame rate; SF_CONTINUOUS_REDRAW=1 draws every frame as before.

Changed

• The release builds use SDL 3.2.30 (was 3.2.10), which fixes Wacom tablets on Windows: clicks dropped with Windows Ink off, and the barrel button pressed while hovering arriving as a left click. On Linux (X11) it also stops the pen's own events from arriving a second time as mouse events.

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.