Sculpt

In one line#

Digital clay, and then some: Sculpt is the largest studio in aukimi. Brush a mesh into shape, then edit its polygons, cut it with booleans, unwrap its UVs, rig it, grow hair on it, and drive the whole thing from a modifier graph.

The layout#

The six families#

The left column is the studio. Forty-five sections is a list you scan without ever learning, so they are grouped, and the grouping is fixed, while the order inside a family is yours to rearrange.

Sculpting#

Start from a primitive#

The Objects tab adds one: sphere, cube, cylinder, cone, capsule, torus, pyramid, disc, plane, torus knot. Or import a mesh, or take one from the file library.

The five modes#

The brushes#

Twenty-nine of them:

⚠️ The letters printed beside the brushes in the tool column are not all the keys that work. The keyboard is dispatched from Sculpt's rebindable shortcut table, and only four of the fifteen labels agree with it: B, C, P and A. Pressing L gives Flatten, not Layer; N gives Inflate; K gives Crease; and S, M, I, D, F, G, R and T are taken by modes, isolation, subdivision, framing and the grid.

The shortcuts page lists what actually fires, and F2 shows the live table, which is also where you can rebind any of it.

Hold Shift to smooth, whatever brush you are on. The single most useful key in the studio.

Brush Settings carries radius, strength, flow, smooth strength and a falloff curve (Basic, Sharp, Round, Flat). Stroke & Pressure is separate: how the stroke is spaced and how a tablet's pressure maps onto it. Brush Presets saves a whole brush, settings included.

Masking, alphas and stencils#

Masking protects part of the surface from every brush: mask, unmask, invert, blur, sharpen, and extract a new mesh from the masked region (Mask Extract).

Alphas are greyscale stamps that shape the brush tip; an Alpha Creator builds them. A Stencil is projected onto the model and painted through, so a pattern lands in screen space rather than following the brush.

The Clip Brush cuts everything on one side of a drawn line flat: rectangle, circle and the other clip regions.

Layers#

Sculpt layers record a pass of sculpting as a separate, blendable strength. Turn one down to half and the wrinkles you sculpted on it are half as deep. This is what makes a sculpting decision reversible after the fact rather than only undoable.

Geometry#

Resolution and topology#

Subdivision raises density one level at a time, the current level shown as n/max. Sculpt coarse shapes low, subdivide, then refine.

Topology is where the mesh gets rebuilt rather than refined:

Smoothing and Mesh Repair are the cleanup pair: relax the surface, and find and fix the holes, non-manifold edges and flipped normals a boolean or an import can leave behind.

Combining and cutting#

A boolean that returns nothing means the meshes do not actually intersect. The panel says so rather than silently producing an empty result.

Modeling#

This family is the part of Sculpt that is not sculpting at all; it is polygon modelling, and it is why the studio is bigger than its name suggests.

Edit Poly#

The sub-object modelling mode. Pick a sub-object mode: vertex, edge, face, border or element, and the rest of the panel follows it.

The operations are the familiar set: Extrude, Inset, Bevel, Chamfer, Bridge, Weld (and Weld by distance), Detach, Flip Normals, Quadrify (pair triangles back into quads), and SG Hard Edges (apply smoothing groups as hard edges).

Then the ones that cut and add: Connect, Cut, Quick Slice, Swift Loop, Edge Loop Slide, Tessellate, Cap Hole, Split, Break, Turn (flip a triangle's shared edge) and Relax. Selections have their own verbs beyond grow and shrink: Select Similar, Select by Material ID, Select Backfaces, and named selections you can store and recall.

There is no Triangulate. There was a button, and it was removed rather than kept: the mesh is triangle-based throughout this editor, so triangulating it did nothing. Collapse does exist, merging a selection to its centroid but it lives in the full-screen Edit Poly editor, not in the side panel.

Three behaviours worth knowing:

• The operations are interactive. "Click an op, then drag on the mesh. Left-click confirms, right-click or Esc cancels, type a number for an exact value." So a bevel is dragged by feel and then typed exactly.
• Extrude and inset have two modes: Group (one shared boundary, averaged normals) or By Polygon (each face extruded independently). They give very different results on a curved surface.
• Repeat Last re-applies the last operation, which is what turns a bevel into a bevelled row.

The viewport can show the mesh as triangles (every diagonal visible) or as quads (coplanar diagonals hidden), and split into 1, 3 or 4 viewports.

Edit Forge, kitbash#

One library, two studios. Edit Forge and the Engine's Kitbash panel read the same collections: a piece built here is placed in Engine, and a piece painted there can be saved back to this library. What the Engine scene stores is the part and its dimensions, not its vertices, so an instance can be updated when the original changes.

Freeze a subtool into a collection, then place its pieces like building blocks. Pieces mate at sockets: purple spheres in the scene, orange for the selected one, draggable, and Auto sockets finds them for you.

Beyond placing one at a time: Repeat places a row at the same spacing, Path, Radial and Scatter place many at once, an interactive spline places along a curve, Mirror produces a true mirror rather than a half-turn, and Pick / Replace swap a placed piece for another while keeping its position.

A Graph view reports the assembly as pieces · links · islands, with Detach, Auto repair and a Validate kit check. Sub-kits save a group of pieces to place as one. Physics on placement gives each piece a collider and a static body, and Solidify every piece does it retroactively, which is what makes a kitbashed set usable in Engine immediately.

The other modelling tools#

Surface & Look#

UV Editor#

A full unwrapping suite, reachable from its own section and from inside Edit Poly. It is not a stripped-down preview: it is where a Sculpt mesh gets its UVs without a trip through Retopo.

Projections and unwrap

• Planar X / Y / Z and Box UV for the quick cases.
• UV Unwrap proper, seam-based, reporting the island count when it finishes, and telling you when it had to fall back rather than pretending it did not.
• Unfold: minimise stretch while keeping pinned points fixed (ARAP), with a Live Unfold that does it continuously as you drag.
• Relax, Optimize, Pin.

Seams and islands

Cut and Detach split, Stitch joins, and islands can be rotated, equalised in size, and arranged by the packer. Equalize density scales every island to a uniform texel density: the difference between a texture that is sharp everywhere and one that is sharp in places.

Checking the result

• A Distortion heatmap, reading squeezed and stretched separately.
• An Overlap check.
• Backgrounds to judge against: checker, colour grid, UV grid, lines, or your own texture.
• Fit 0–1 frames the tile.

Selecting and transforming

Select by vertex, edge, face or island, with All / None / Invert and a live count; then move, scale, rotate 90°, flip U or V, mirror horizontally or vertically, transform the selection or transform all.

Painting in UV space

The editor has a second mode: Paint. Brush, eraser, eyedropper, line, rectangle, pixel and grid tools, a fill-selected-faces command, a resolution setting, and Export PNG. So a texture can be started here, on the layout, without leaving Sculpt.

The rest of Surface & Look#

Rig & Deformation#

The deformers are a stack rather than one-shot operations: the order matters and each stays editable.

Tools#

Measurement puts real distances on the model. Modifier Graph is the procedural layer: operations wired as a graph rather than applied and forgotten, so a parameter stays adjustable after the fact.

Nimbus 3D, point clouds and gaussian splats#

A studio of its own, opened from Sculpt's Tool menu, for the case where the 3D asset does not start as clay but as a scan.

Bring it in: .PLY, .SPLAT, .XYZ, .PTS, .LAS, .LAZ, .OBJ, .STL, or a folder of photos. Drag them onto the window.

Look at it: point size, splat scale, background, grid and axes. Colour by height, normal or intensity; draw points as circles or squares, or render them as gaussian splats at low, medium or high quality with an opacity threshold.

Clean it, the three passes a raw scan needs: statistical outlier removal, voxel downsample, and remove isolated points. Plus a crop box with min/max bounds, applied or reset.

Turn it into a mesh, reconstruction with a choice of algorithm:

Preview the result as wireframe or smooth shaded, and read the scene info: point count, triangle count, bounding box.

Send it on: Send to Sculpt to keep working on it as clay, or export .OBJ, .PLY or .GLB.

The reconstruction algorithms run locally and are deliberately approximate. What Nimbus guarantees is that its output is explicit and measurable before you hand it to another studio, which is why the scene info panel matters more here than in the other studios.

Files it reads and writes#

The Export tab in the properties panel is the one for handing a mesh to something outside aukimi.

Sending work to other studios#

Produces a high-poly mesh. Accepts high-poly meshes, retopo meshes and PBR material sets from Matter.

Send to on the toolbar is the direct route. Retopo is the usual next stop for a dense organic sculpt, but note that a mesh built in Edit Poly and unwrapped in the UV Editor may already be game-ready, and can go straight to Pigment or Engine.

Kitbash collections built in Edit Forge are placed directly in the Engine, keeping their source and version so a placed instance can be updated later.

Version control#

The Version Control panel keeps snapshots of the mesh inside the studio, separate from the project-level versions in Projects and documents.

Working with someone else#

Sculpt syncs operation by operation. Strokes travel as vertex deltas, and one operation covers sculpting, masking and polypaint; subtools, subdivision, remesh results, symmetry and materials all sync too. Two people can sculpt the same mesh at once.

The render backend is chosen per machine and is deliberately not taken from a peer: a collaborator on a WebGPU machine will not flip your session's label on a machine without it.

Limits and common snags#

• A slow brush usually means too many subdivisions. Check the face count in the status bar; step down a level to block out, back up to detail.
• Y Pose does nothing without an armature. Build one first.
• A boolean that returns no geometry means the meshes do not intersect.
• Unwrapping reports a fallback when it takes one. Read the island count and the fallback note rather than assuming a clean unwrap.
• Overlapping UVs are only a problem for some uses. The overlap check tells you they exist; whether that matters depends on whether you are baking.
• Memory is shown in the status bar for a reason. A high-poly sculpt is the heaviest thing in a project.