Sculptcore

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Over the past few years I’ve been working on Sculptcore, a digital sculpting system for 3D digital content creation (DCC) apps. The goal is to have a single system that can be plugged into Blender, Maya, etc.

I’ve made a Blender add-on for this; it uses a small fork of Blender that extends the add-on API to allow for custom object modes. This is pre-alpha work, it supports dyntopo (with full attribute support), multires, and a fair number of Blender brushes (though some are broken and others are untested). Currently brush textures do not work. There is no integration of the modifier stack (sculptcore’s multires doesn’t use it); I’m planning to do that at a later stage. There are also a number of features that aren’t yet exposed to blender at all such as sculpt layers, GPU execution of brushes, vector displacement maps, etc.

I did much of the development with Claude Code. I designed this system a number of years ago but progress was slow due to the sheer complexity of it, but agentic AI has made implementing it a lot easier.

You can download a zip with the custom Blender build (including the addon) here (remember this is all pre-alpha!), direct links below:

To use, open the build and ctrl-tab into the ‘Sculpcore’ mode (the addon doesn’t replace sculpt mode, it just adds a new one).

Why Not Do This Directly In Blender

I don’t believe digital sculpting is appropriate to include in the core feature set of DCC software. As far as I know there are no organizations in the world that have successfully done this. In my opinion digital sculpting should be developed inside of independent organizations dedicated to it.

Test Files

UvDynTopoTest.blend (482.5 KB)

Updates

  • Fixed windows startup crash
  • Fixed various multires bugs:
    • Multires modifier was being disabled on file load
    • Displacements were failing to propagate to coarser levels
    • Export to blender’s MDisps used wrong tangent frame
  • Fixed view3d pivot

Pending Build

  • Fixed multires mask drawing
  • Fixed face set drawing.
    Note: face sets do not properly save for multires objects yet
  • Made sure most blender attributes properly save/load from sculptcore. I think the only missing ones are the QUATERNION type and something to do with particle systems
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The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 2)
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I updated the build, the windows crash should be fixed. Some multires fixes should land in the next day or two.

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Should make some videos of it in action. Multires and dyntopo without destroying UVs while showing textures. I specifically need that feature to smooth out the terrain of a Wii Mario Kart level to put into BeamNG.

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FYI I had misconfigured the build, which slowed down native sculpt mode by quite a lot. I had noticed that sculptcore’s multires was quite a bit faster then blender’s, which made no sense since the addon currently doesn’t use any of the performance optimizations that will hopefully make it much faster in the future. I’ll be kicking off new builds, which should restore native sculpt mode to its proper speed.