Nomad Sculpt, the touch-friendly sculpting app known from the iPad, is now available as a public beta for Windows, macOS and Linux. The desktop edition includes all current features of the iPad version and is free during the beta phase. How long that will last? Unknown. But it’s free now, so no complaints.
The desktop edition is available directly from the official Nomad Sculpt website, where the beta builds can be downloaded for all three major platforms.
Same Tools, New Platforms
If you’ve used Nomad on iPad, you’ll feel right at home. The desktop beta includes all current features of the iPad version, Nomad Sculpt offers a comprehensive suite of features tailored for digital sculpting and painting. Its extensive toolset includes brushes such as Clay, Crease, Trim, Smooth, and Mask, with customizable strokes featuring falloff, alpha, and other options. Rendering capabilities encompass both Matcap and Physically Based Rendering (PBR), while vertex painting tools provide control over roughness and metalness properties.
For topology management, Nomad Sculpt supports multiresolution sculpting, voxel uniform remeshing with subtractive boolean operations, dynamic topology for localized mesh refinement, and robust layers that accommodate topology changes. The interface is intuitively designed for mobile devices, supporting pressure sensitivity with Apple Pencil and Samsung S Pen. Additionally, the application facilitates import and export in OBJ, STL, and glTF formats. (nomadsculpt.com)
Licensing: Undecided
As of now, the desktop version of Nomad is free to use in its beta phase. Whether a permanent free version will exist or if a pricing model will follow is still undecided. The iPad version is currently priced at €18.99 on the App Store, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate future desktop pricing.
Still in Beta: Use With Caution
As a beta release, Nomad Sculpt for desktop should be considered not yet production-ready. Bugs, crashes or missing features may occur. Testing is encouraged, but integrating the tool into production pipelines should wait until stability and long-term support are clarified.
For now, Nomad offers a remarkably full-featured, responsive sculpting tool on desktop – assuming you don’t mind being a beta-tester with a Wacom.
