SculptForge

Added

• Gizmo All mode (Shift+W, top shelf, Sculpt > Symmetry & Gizmo; the gizmo_mode command): move, rotate and scale handles at once, with clear priorities where they cross and no overlaps at any zoom or UI scale. Snapping, the readout, posing with a mask, Alt+drag for the pivot and one undo step per drag work as in the single modes. Idea by fenix on Discord (thanks @fenixpoints, #118).
• Keep original checkbox under Tool > Parts > Split (Hidden / Masked / Unmasked; keep=true on part_split_hidden, part_split_masked, part_split_unmasked): the triangles are copied into the new Part (UVs, face groups, vertex paint, sculpt layers; the copy is cut at the current subdivision level) and the source Part stays untouched, levels and mask included. One undo step removes the copy. Requested by _tfx on Discord.
• Website: Most-wanted brushes on the brushes page (sculptforge.app/brushes.html#requests): brush requests from the #ideas forum on our Discord, ranked by 👍 votes and refreshed every 30 minutes, with shipped ones marked. The data is also published as sculptforge.app/brush-requests.json.

Changed

• Release packages are built once per set of build inputs: a commit whose packaged files are byte for byte an earlier green build's (a website or release-paperwork change) reuses that build's packages, verified and attested as before, instead of building them again (docs/releasing.md, "Build once, promote").
• Monthly challenge on Discord: submissions close on the 27th at 23:59, then everyone votes in a Discord poll until the end of the month; the winner (Featured Artist and a spot on sculptforge.app) is announced on the 1st. The website and the guide's Discord page say so.
• Member builds in the app now come from the SculptForge organization; update to keep signing in.
• Tool > Geometry is reorganised by task (Levels, Micro Detail, Resolution, Cleanup, Symmetry) with clearer names; your hotkeys, scripts and search keep working.
• Membership wording in the app, the guide and the README now matches the membership page: Member Requests are one request a month, built first and credited to you (Help > Support, the welcome screen and the membership card; Spanish and Chinese too). Bugs are always free, and every idea goes in the public feature queue.

Fixed

• Blender input style: Ctrl+Shift did nothing on the model (Ctrl is Blender's invert, so Ctrl+Shift became an inverted smooth), so the Cut shapes and the Ctrl+Shift hide/isolate gestures were out of reach. Ctrl+Shift now keeps its meaning in every style (drag: hide or cut; add Alt: inside / the other side; Ctrl+Shift+click the brush tile or Ctrl+Shift+B: the selection and Cut shapes). Ctrl alone still inverts, Shift alone still smooths. Alt+Q (pick the Part under the cursor, Blender's own key) is now listed with the Blender keys, since Alt+click masks there (thanks dm4nd on Discord).
• Cut with symmetry on: a shape whose mirror image overlaps it (a rectangle across the middle, a centred one seen at an angle) sometimes cut one side only, In and Add went deeper on one side, and a later cut across those caps could leave a crack. The mirror image now measures its depth on the Part as it was, cuts stop at once instead of leaving one side done, and the zero-area slivers the overlap left in the cap are cleaned up so the next cut closes (thanks dm4nd on Discord).
• Tool > Parts > Extract and Project labels were cut off in a narrow tray (since 0.11.11). The settings now read Thickness, Edge Smooth, Both Sides, Corners and Border; a pair shares a row only when both labels fit, else each takes its own, and Both Sides / Corners / Border wrap. Scripts use triangle_corners / triangle_border; the old argument and action names still work.
• macOS: SculptForge > Preferences... in the app menu was greyed out; it now opens Preferences, as Cmd+, and Edit

  Preferences do

Added

• Tube (Tool > Tube): draw tubes freely in 3D space, like a 3D pen. Strokes lie on a plane facing the view (at the surface where the stroke starts, the pivot, or a fixed distance), optionally snapped onto surfaces; pen pressure sets the radius and the stroke is smoothed into a curve. The tube is swept along it with rings placed closer in bends and frames that never twist, round or flat ends, and Symmetry X. Each stroke is a Tube Part whose points are dragged (Ctrl: thickness, Alt+click: delete), inserted and deleted until Bake, or goes straight into the active Part with even edge lengths for dynamic topology; one undo step each. Script and AI commands tube_new, tube_list, tube_set_point, tube_insert_point, tube_delete_point, tube_set, tube_bake. Guide chapter "Tube: draw in 3D space". Requested by GABO on Discord.
• Hardware tiers (Edit > Preferences > Performance): the detected tier and why ("RTX 3060, 12 GB VRAM, 32 GB RAM: High"), what it turns on, Auto or any tier by hand. The Essential tier works exactly as before; Standard and up keep more Focus Detail in memory, and High and up allow 16K paint and bake textures. A small card on first launch (and after a hardware change) shows the tier once; the chip in the top bar opens the panel. A memory guard steps the tier down a level when free memory runs low, and back up when there is room. Turbo (the bolt in the top bar, View > Turbo, Ctrl+Alt+T): antialiasing off and a lighter view while you sculpt and orbit, the detected tier's top budgets; full quality when the view stops, and Off changes nothing you set. Remembered per computer. Graphics card picker on computers with two (applies on the next start, through the system's own setting; a card that fails to start falls back to the system's choice). Compute: Auto / CPU / GPU, with each task's path shown (all CPU for now). SF_HW_SIMULATE=floor|standard|high|extreme, SF_TIER_, SF_COMPUTE=cpu|gpu, SF_TURBO=1 for benches. Memory in the top bar, beside the triangles and frame rate: SculptForge's RAM and the system's free RAM, and the graphics card's memory in use where its driver reports it (NVIDIA; AMD shows what's free), updated once a second; hover for the detail. Thanks, Oslen on Discord.
• Split > Hidden / Masked / Unmasked (Tool > Parts; part_split_hidden, part_split_masked, part_split_unmasked): the triangles leave the active Part for a new Part below it (same folder, visibility and shading), one undo step that also removes the new Part. A triangle is masked when its corners' average mask is above 50%. UVs, face groups, vertex paint and sculpt layers carry over; subdivision levels are cut at the current level (undo restores them). Thanks foirgairwolf on Discord.
• Delete masked (Tool > Visibility; delete_masked), the mirror of Delete hidden. Thanks foirgairwolf on Discord.
• A per-Part shading mark in the Parts list (Scene / Smooth / Flat; part_shading). Thanks foirgairwolf on Discord.
• Merge by Distance (Tool > Geometry; weld_points distance=... preview=true): the points of the active Part within the distance merge into the nearest kept one; collapsed triangles go; one undo step. The count follows the slider and the points that would merge show in orange. Thanks foirgairwolf on Discord.
• Check Mesh (Tool > Geometry; mesh_check, mesh_fix issue=...): non-manifold edges (Fix loosens the extra triangles), holes (capped as Close Holes), duplicate and degenerate triangles (deleted), zero-area triangles (shortest edge collapsed), flipped triangles and inside-out closed pieces (rewound), isolated points (removed). Fix all fixes everything except holes, as one undo step. Thanks foirgairwolf on Discord.
• Recent colours (Oslen on Discord): under the left shelf's two swatches, the last eight paint colours a stroke or Fill used, newest first, in rows of four; click one to paint with it.

Added

• Deformation stack (Tool > Deformation > Stack, requested by foirgairwolf on Discord): thirteen whole-Part shape operations in four groups (Transform: Move, Turn, Scale, Squash; Bend & Twist: Bend, Twist, Taper, Shear; Shape: Round, Box, Flatten, Sag, Depth; plus the Surface ones), each along any of X, Y and Z about the Part's centre (or the gizmo's placed pivot), with Direction for Bend and Shear and Soft for an eased profile. The preview is the stack applied as one undo step and follows each change; Apply, Apply Selected, Reset and Repeat. The mask holds what it covers. Commands deform_move ... deform_depth and deform_stack for scripts and the AI.
• Size (Tool > Deformation, requested by foirgairwolf on Discord): the active Part's X, Y and Z dimensions in scene units, to drag or type exactly; it resizes about its centre (Uniform: in proportion), one undo step. Command deform_size.
• Top bar heart (Help > Support SculptForge); a small badge for verified members. Hidden in studio builds and before it would crowd a narrow top bar.
• Note fragments take member_request: true (and member_credit: @handle when the member opted in): What's New tags the change "Requested by a member".
• Website: Feature queue (sculptforge.app/queue.html, footer link on the membership page): every feature idea with its status (building, queued, shipped, already in the app, declined) and a member flag.

Changed

• Blender add-on and Maya script have their own versions and can be released on their own, as soon as they change (GitHub releases blender-vX.Y.Z / maya-vX.Y.Z); the website's download links follow the newest one. The add-on is now 1.0.0 (it used to carry the app's version). Each SculptForge release still includes both.
• Membership card: milestone moments (10th start, 10 hours of stroke time, 100th save; local counts only, nothing sent), an optional honest line from the update feed's support block (funded this month, Founding Members taken, member requests this release), and a backoff (monthly after the 3rd "Not now", only after an update after the 6th). Every existing rule stays: never modal, never mid-stroke or during a job, never in tests, renders or CI, never for members, at most once a week.
• Compact bars (factoberplay on YouTube): the Library strip and the Sculpt Timeline take 158 logical px instead of 228 (31% less). The Library's thumbnails are 64 px by default (were 96) and its tab row 26 px; drag the strip's edge toward the canvas to size them (48-128 px, kept with the layout; also Edit > Preferences > Library > Thumbnails). The timeline is one row (step count, track, icon buttons) with thin branch lanes; the full strip with its header row comes back from the unfold icon or Edit > Preferences > Interface > Compact timeline.
• The membership cards link to the membership terms (Terms & refunds, sculptforge.app/terms.html), and open only their fixed links.
• The built-in Stone Carve brush (Sculpt > Brush, and the community gallery) has a name of our own. Shelves, key bindings, pie menus and scripts saved with its old name still find it.
• Website: How requests work on the membership page (sculptforge.app/support.html#requests): bugs are always free; every idea goes in a public queue; members' requests are built first, one guaranteed request a month each (built and credited); Founding Members and Studio go first; a monthly member vote sets the order; popular ideas from everyone still get built. A "Built for members" list shows what member requests became.
• Website: Studio membership now lists your own private repository and build (a branch with the features and fixes you ask for, rebased onto every release), a private Discord space for your team and a seat on the Studio steering committee (one representative per studio).

Fixed

• The one-line Linux installer (curl -fsSL .../install/install.sh | sh) downloa

Added

• Generate 3D > Remove flat background (on by default): a thin wall behind or ground under the subject, covering most of the model's bounds, is removed from the generated mesh before remeshing, as its own undo step; a relief or a coin on its own is kept. image_to_3d / text_to_3d take remove_background=false, and the new remove_flat_background command does it on the active Part. Requested by fenix on Discord.
• Linked Duplicates (#94, asked for by ebarranco; the idea of placing copies on their own by NicTanghe): Tool > Parts > Linked Duplicate adds a Part sharing the active one's mesh, undo history and GPU buffers, with its own transform. Strokes, masking and painting on any copy edit the shared mesh (symmetry about the copy's own axes); the Gizmo and transform move a linked copy as a whole (a mask poses the shared mesh instead); Make Unique breaks the link; deleting one keeps the others. The Parts list shows a link and the count. Projects keep the links (project format 8); glTF reuses one mesh with a node per copy, USD writes instanceable prims referencing the first copy (and reads them back), OBJ / STL / FBX / PLY write each copy where it is. Commands part_duplicate_linked and part_make_unique. 500 linked copies use about the memory of one mesh.
• Orbit lock (View > Orbit lock, a request from foirgairwolf on Discord): besides Free and Y (the turntable), rotation drags can turn the view about the world X or Z axis only, with no drift over long drags. A key for each (Alt+Shift+F / Y / X / Z) and the orbit_lock axis=free|y|x|z command; the axis gizmo draws the locked axis through its disc with a lock badge. Shift still snaps to side views. Saved with the preferences (also Preferences > Interface / Input > Rotation; older versions read Y as Turntable).
• Website: Jobs (sculptforge.app/jobs.html, footer link): open sculpting and 3D modeling roles worldwide (games, film and VFX, animation, collectibles, 3D printing, jewelry and dental CAD, AR/VR) from the companies' own public job feeds, filtered by region, sector, role, Remote and contract. A daily GitHub Action (tools/jobs/fetch.py, sources in tools/jobs/studios.yaml) refreshes it; titles, companies and places only, never job descriptions.

Changed

• The window title starts with the project name and a "*" for unsaved changes (taskbars stay readable), then SculptForge and its version, and the top bar shows the version, small and dim, beside the name in both layouts (a narrow window drops it). A narrow window or a high UI scale (a 1024 px window at 200 %) never draws top bar items over each other any more: the version goes first, then the layout presets and Save Snapshot, the search field shrinks to its icon, and the menus that don't fit open from a >> button. Betas show their tag ("0.12.0 beta.2") in the accent colour; builds from a git checkout show "dev" and their commit.

Fixed

• The membership card now shows the Studio membership's flat price for any number of artists.
• Reconstruct Subdiv (Tool > Geometry): the levels it builds keep each face inside one UV island when the imported high-poly's seams run through the lower level's faces (UVs made on the high-poly, automatic unwraps with overlapping islands). Such faces used to take each corner's UV from a different island and stretch across UDIM tiles. Reconstructing again on such a mesh also finds the right lower level now. Thanks @RodTDai for the report, the screenshots and the diagnosis that pointed to the fix (#145).
• Timelapse: a PBR timelapse of a high-detail sculpt flickered a little in the video (not in the view): after each step of the history the frames switched between the full mesh and its lighter preview levels. Timelapse frames and --render turntables now always draw the full mesh. Thanks @ebarranco.
• The Sculpt Timeline strip's header no longer runs under Save with project in a narrow wind