Sculpt On An iPad With Forger

We’ve been sculpting digitally on our PCs and Macs for years now, but what about sculpting on an iPad?

- Glen Southern

Digital sculpting is now well established in many industries including game design, TV and film production (pre and post), medical imaging, and in all kinds of advertising. One of the granddaddy programs is ZBrush and that started life in the mid-1990s soon to be followed by Mudbox, 3DCoat, and even open-source programs like Blender. Where a project requires highly detailed organic assets such as creatures, characters, monsters, aliens, environments, rounded or intricate vehicles and buildings you will see artists using digital sculpting, but not so much on mobile – until you look a little deeper and come across amazingly powerful sculpting apps that can run comfortably on an iPad. In this tutorial, we can take an initial look at what sculpting on the iPad is like and what you can actually do with it. The Forger app has been around for a few years now but in recent releases, the toolset has expanded to a point where you could feasibly use it to work on commercial projects like blocking out or basic character designs. In these steps, we will look at how to take a primitive shape and sculpt out a cartoony head, add some eyes and teeth and then paint the whole character. It doesn’t end there as the end result can be exported and used in a range of other software.

01 FIRST, YOU NEED FORGER

Forger is available on the App Store from your iPad. I use a 2018 iPad with a 256gig SSD and 4gig of RAM. Apple doesn’t really publish its RAM specifications openly so you may need to dig around to see what your iPad has under the hood (or if you are looking to buy one). You also need an Apple Pencil and that can be either the first or second-generation version.

02 OPEN FORGER AND LET’S GET GOING