For those who don’t know the tool: tamga is a quick sculpt plus vertex paint sketchpad that hands off via Wavefront OBJ to heavier DCCs like Blender when your scene stops being cute.
Small app, big get-it-done energy
tamga runs in a web browser, on desktop, and as an iPad app. The web version targets browsers with WebGPU. The iPad version requires iPadOS 26.0 or later. The design goes for minimal UI and a low friction workflow. There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and no ads stated for the tool. The tool is also described as offline by choice, with work staying on the device. This makes tamga a handy place to rough shapes, do quick paint passes, and spit out something presentable before you move to the usual monsters.
Sculpting that stays out of your way
Brushes include Clay, Smooth, Inflate, Flatten, and Drag. A modifier flips brush behavior into an alternate mode, and there is a smooth override that temporarily switches to the smooth brush at the same size. Dynamic topology is available per brush and is described as auto-splitting and simplifying as you sculpt. Remeshing rebuilds uniform topology at a chosen voxel density, and version notes mention a Close Holes button in the Remesh pop-up.
Symmetry support includes mirror sculpting across an axis, plus a symmetrize operation that applies symmetry to existing geometry. There are desktop shortcuts for undo and redo, and gesture based undo and redo on iPad.
Masks, booleans, and posing without the drama
You can paint masks to protect areas from other brushes, with an unmask action via the modifier concept. Masks also feed mesh creation. Extract Masked creates a new mesh from the masked region, and Extract Shell creates a thin shell from the mask boundary.
For fast shape bashing, there are primitives with boolean operations: union, subtract, and intersect. A smoothness slider controls how soft the boolean blend is. Positioning uses a gizmo, snapping is on by default, and a modifier disables snapping.
There is also a pose workflow built around placing anchors and dragging to deform, with options to remove anchors, freeze to bake deformation, and clear anchors. tamga comes from galata.ink, and it is a weekend project created outside professional VFX work.
Vertex paint, plus ink lines for style passes
Painting is vertex based, so paint lives on the mesh rather than in UV mapped textures. Channels listed include albedo, roughness, and metallic, with per channel toggles for painting, filling, and clearing.
Ink mode lets you draw ink like strokes on the 3D surface. View styles listed include paper mode, matcap, and PBR. Paper mode has controls such as valleys, peaks, chisel, and a mix control that blends between standard rendering and full paper mode. Render export formats listed are PNG, JPEG, and OpenEXR.
Export, pricing, and the reality check
Import and export uses Wavefront OBJ, so you can hand off to tools like Autodesk Maya or ZBrush when you need deeper pipelines. There is also export to a tamga format, plus auto recovery that saves work and restores after crashes, hopefully. Personal use is free, and personal, educational, and non profit use is free on most platforms. Commercial use requires one time payment of 12.99 USD.
A final note for people who ship frames for a living: test new tools and innovations before you rely on them in production, especially around OBJ round trips and vertex paint persistence. Do one quick scuplt, export it, reimport it, and check if the alebdo channel survives. If it does, you just bought yourself a nimble little idea machine.
