SculptForge, a new open source sculpting application billed as a free ZBrush alternative, now trains gaussian splats locally from a phone video or photos. The Train from capture tool arrived in version 0.9.0 last week, alongside a one click Make sculptable command that turns a splat into a quad mesh.
Splats have been in SculptForge since its first release, v0.1.0, which read and wrote PLY, .splat, glTF through the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension Khronos introduced in February, and the ParticleField3DGaussianSplat schema OpenUSD 26.03 added to its core. Until 0.9.0, splats made from a capture still had to be trained in another application.
Training runs on Brush, pinned to the 0.3.0 release that added hybrid MCMC training, which SculptForge downloads on request and checks against a SHA-256 hash. COLMAP supplies camera positions, while ffmpeg keeps the sharpest frame from each stretch of video. COLMAP and nerfstudio datasets also work as inputs, as do captures sent from a phone browser after scanning a QR code.
SculptForge's guide states that no CUDA is needed and nothing is uploaded. The splat appears in the viewport after the first checkpoint and keeps sharpening, with step count, PSNR and elapsed time shown and a button to stop early. The Fast preview preset runs 5,000 steps at 1024 px from 80 frames with SH degree 1, and Quality runs 30,000 steps at 1920 px from 200 frames with SH degree 3. Results export as .ply, .splat, .glb or .usdz.
Make sculptable builds a watertight, manifold surface from opacity weighted Gaussian density on a voxel grid, then remeshes it to quads at a Game budget of 4,000, Film at 12,000, or Sculpt at 2,000 with two subdivision levels. Capture color carries over as polypaint or a texture. On a head, SculptForge places edge loops around the eyes and mouth from depth and color alone. The developer's changelog reports 5 million splats converted to Film quads with face loops in about 9 seconds and 0.9 GB on an M1 Pro.
A sculptor can now walk around a clay maquette with a phone, train it, and keep sculpting on the result in one application. Brush has no prebuilt binaries for Linux on ARM or Intel Macs, so those users must compile it from source.
SculptForge 0.10.7 is available now on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 license.
