What is SculptGL and what features does it offer?

Updated

SculptGL is a digital sculpting web app created by Stéphane Ginier, available directly in the browser and also as a standalone download that is identical to the web version. It is aimed at 3D artists and hobbyists who want to sculpt, paint, and remesh models without leaving the browser. The same developer is currently working on Nomad Sculpt, a sculpting application for iOS and Android, but SculptGL remains the browser-based tool documented on stephaneginier.com.

Core sculpting tools

SculptGL ships with a standard set of sculpting brushes:

  • Brush
  • Inflate
  • Smooth
  • Twist
  • Drag
  • and other standard tools

These cover the typical workflow of building up and refining a mesh by hand.

Painting and texturing

Beyond geometry, SculptGL supports PBR vertex painting, letting you set color, roughness, and metalness per vertex. Each tool can also use an alpha texture, so brush strokes can follow a stamped shape rather than a plain falloff.

Multiresolution sculpting

Multiresolution sculpting lets you work across subdivision levels while keeping your edits:

  • Quad-tri subdivision using catmull-clark or loop schemes
  • Reversion, which computes the opposite of subdivision where possible
  • Navigating between low and high poly subdivision levels retains sculpting changes
  • UVs are kept through both reversion and subdivision

This is useful when you want to block out a shape at low resolution and then add detail at higher levels without losing the base.

Remeshing and topology

Two remeshing approaches are available:

Voxel remeshing uses the SurfaceNets meshing algorithm and produces a quad-only mesh. It can generate uniform remeshing where quads all have the same size. Two caveats are worth knowing: it can create non-manifold vertices, and for a non-closed mesh a naive hole-filling algorithm runs first. Voxel remeshing deletes UVs.

Dynamic topology works on triangles only and operates in real time. It performs local subdivision (creating new triangles) and local decimation (deleting triangles). Like voxel remeshing, it deletes UVs.

Import and export

SculptGL supports OBJ, PLY, and STL for both import and export. It reads vertex color, and it optimizes post and pre transform cache using a tipsy algorithm. Undo/redo is supported throughout.

Where to get it and related projects

  • The web app runs in the browser; a standalone version is available for download and is identical to the web version.
  • Sources are available on GitHub.
  • It is also published on the Chrome Web Store.
  • A set of tutorials is available on a YouTube channel linked from the site.
  • Sketchfab made a fork of the old SculptGL version with a new design, called Sculptfab.

The site also mentions EditSDF, a smaller experimental project for raymarched signed distance fields. It is described as less polished than SculptGL and somewhat clunky in its GUI, but was fun to make.

Who it is for

SculptGL suits anyone who wants a free, browser-accessible sculpting tool with PBR vertex painting, multiresolution workflows, and remeshing, and who is comfortable with the limitation that remeshing operations discard UVs. If you need a mobile-native sculpting app instead, the developer's newer project Nomad Sculpt targets iOS and Android.