Originally posted on 5 August. Scroll down for updates.

Sigrasoft – aka former EA and Rockstar Games technical animator Stefaan Sorensen – has released WaxLab 3d: a new plugin that adds a brush-based sculpting toolset to Maya.

All the standard sculpting tools, plus a few nice extras
Designed to add tools “similar to those found in professional standalone sculpting packages” like Mudbox or ZBrush, Waxlab 3D provides a fairly standard basic set of brushes, including Extrude, Bulge, Pinch and Flatten.

(More unusually, there’s also a Smear brush, which acts like a 3D version of Photoshop’s Smudge Tool.)

Each one has an envelope to adjust brush radius and falloff; there are options for constraining Extrude and Flatten relative to surface normals; and symmetrical modelling automatically smooths the axis of symmetry.

The other features are pretty much what you’d expect: Wacom tablet support, masks, stencils (for surface deformation, not surface colour), and a deformer for creating linked versions of a model with different LoDs.

There are also a couple of nice extras, including a heightmap tool for sculpting terrain, and the option to show very dense meshes in the viewport as point clouds, to improve real-time interactivity.

Pricing and availability
WaxLab 3d is available for Maya 2013-2015 on Windows XP and above and OS X 10.9, price $129.99. If you want to try before you buy, you can use it free for 30 days, and the full PDF manual is available online.

Updated 17 September: The Linux version of WaxLab 3d is now available.

Read a full list of features in WaxLab 3d

Download the trial version of WaxLab 3d

Tags: brush, brushes, Featured Articles, heightmap, level of detail, mask, Maya, Mudbox, plugin, point cloud, price, sculpting, Sigrasoft, Stefaan Sorensen, stencil, subdivision, tablet, Wacom, WaxLab 3d, ZBrush