Get neat lightweight 3D sculpting and painting app Tamga
VFX TD and tools developer Ahmet Levent Taşel has released Tamga, a promising lightweight 3D sculpting, digital painting and stylized rendering app.
The “minimalist 3D sculpting tool for artists who want to create, not memorize buttons” is available a browser app, a desktop tool for Windows, macOS and Linux, and as an iPad app.
It’s free for personal use, and costs under $15 for commercial work.
An intentionally minimal digital sculpting app, intended to ‘solve artist fatigue’
Ahmet Levent Taşel created Tamga as a weekend project outside his professional work in VFX: he was previously Lead TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Senior R&D Engineer at Eyeline.
It’s a deliberately minimal app that “tries to solve … artist fatigue” with more complex digital sculpting tools, aiming for a simplicity of workflow closer to sculpting with real clay.
It provides a lightweight alternative to commercial tools like ZBrush and Mudbox for character or creature design, or for creating simple assets for concept art, game development or VFX.
The software is “designed and polished” for iPad, and is built for a touchscreen and Apple Pencil, with “every tool reachable in two taps”.
However, it is also available as a desktop app, for Windows, Linux and macOS and even runs inside a web browser, for working on the move.
A lightweight online and desktop alternative to tools like Mudbox and ZBrush
At the heart of Tamga is a set of brush-based sculpting tools that will be familiar to users of other software, including Clay, Smooth, Inflate, Flatten and Drag.
Users can paint masks onto the surface of a sculpt to limit the area being modified, and there are standard options for mirroring strokes.
It’s also possible to make larger modifications to a sculpt with a pose toolset, for repositioning characters, and even by performing Boolean modeling operations like union and substract.
3D painting tools geared towards non-photorealistic ink-and-paper style effects
For texturing, Tamga includes a simple set of vertex painting tools, making it possible to paint directly onto the surface of the sculpt, painting into PBR texture channels.
More unusually, a dedicated Ink mode makes it possible to paint ink-like strokes, to create stylized, non-photorealistic effects, like the ones shown in the video above.
Exports to other DCC applications in OBJ format
Tamga imports and exports OBJ files, making it possible to exchange 3D models with DCC software like 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D and Maya, or to refine them in other sculpting apps.
It’s also possible to create test renders inside Tamga – it has lighting controls, including built-in HDRI environments, plus simple camera effects – and export them in PNG, JPEG or EXR format.
You can find an overview of its features in the – equally minimal – online documentation.
Price and system requirements
Tamga is available as a browser-based tool for WebGPU-compatible browsers, as an iPad app for iPadOS 26.0+, and as a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux.
The software is free for personal use. Commercial use requires a one-time payment of CAD $17.99 (around USD $13).
Use digital sculpting and painting tool Tamga free in a web browser
Download the desktop and iPad editions of Tamga
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