Sculpt from
3D references

Sculptors learn by looking. They model clay from plaster casts and live models: they walk around the model, compare it with their clay from every side, and correct what they see.

SplatStudy puts the model on the screen, next to the clay — no studio or cast needed. A Gaussian splat, a 3D capture made from photos, keeps what a mesh loses: the light on the cast, its surface, its small marks.

The screen is split in two, the way you would set up a modelling stand next to the cast.

• Drop in a Gaussian splat (.ply, .splat, .spz), a mesh or 3D scan (OBJ, PLY, STL) or an image
• Three plaster casts to start with, scanned by SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, and free to use (CC0): Brutus, the Venus de Milo and the Head of David
• Stand the reference upright, crop away the floor, and keep its credit: title, author, licence and source
• Link the cameras so both views turn together
• Preset viewpoints, an orthographic camera, swap the sides, hide the panels

Not hundreds of brushes. Seven tools, each one something you do with your hands, a loop tool or a spatula, and a mask. Hold Alt for the opposite action (Ctrl in Blender and Maya style), Shift to smooth, Space for a pie menu of the tools.

• Pen pressure sets the strength and the size
• A falloff for each tool, and a stabiliser for steady lines
• Left–right symmetry, undo and redo
• Subdivision levels: block in the broad forms low, add detail high
• Voxel remesh, quad remesh, and mirror one side to the other
• Start from the reference: turn it into a rough block of clay to refine
• Import a mesh to start from, export OBJ and STL
• Keep the hands you know: navigation like ZBrush, Blender or Maya*

Step back, squint, look at the outline, look in a mirror: old studio habits for seeing a form fresh. SplatStudy turns them into buttons.

• Silhouette: both views as flat shapes, to compare outlines, with a match score and the difference in colour
• Ghost: the reference laid over your clay
• Mirror view: flip the picture to see your errors fresh
• Plumb line and grid
• Measure proportions: a length in each view, as a ratio
• Lighting: studio, raking or from the top
• Chalk: dust the clay, and see where your strokes have been
• A pose timer for sessions and rounds

SplatStudy records every stroke with its time. Watch your sculpture grow from the first sphere at ×10, ×60 or ×300, with long pauses shortened to two seconds. The replay is exact: it rebuilds the same shape, bit for bit.

• Replay in the app: play, pause, speed, scrub
• Export it as a video, alone or next to the reference, in 16:9, 1:1 or 9:16: a fixed view or a slow turntable, the time and a title if you like, and the reference's credit
• A screenshot of both views, side by side
• Scenes keep the clay, its whole history and the reference. The browser saves as you work.

SplatStudy is an entry for Built with Claude: Japan 2026 (2–8 November 2026). All of its code is written during the event, together with Claude Code.

• CLAUDE.md holds the project's rules: structure, conventions, licences, and when a task counts as done.
• Hooks guard the work: one stops any tool call that tries to open earlier prototypes, so every line is new; another checks that each new source file carries its licence header.
• Skills for the routine: verify-web builds the browser version and checks it in headless Edge, add-ui-string adds a string in Japanese, English and French. A licence-reviewer agent checks every new file and dependency.
• Features are designed in plan mode, with a Plan subagent reviewing the design from another angle — the seven tools and the sculpt-view controls came out of it.
• Claude reads the source of wgpu, egui and SDL3 for their current APIs instead of guessing.
• Checks run in headless Edge: Claude draws strokes, takes screenshots and reads the console. The picture above was made that way.
• A dev log, one entry a day, in Japanese.
• This website too was planned and built with Claude Code.

Start in the browser, with nothing to install. SplatStudy for Blender, in progress, will bring the reference into Blender, next to the model you sculpt there.

SplatStudy is free and open source software (GPL). One codebase in Rust runs in the browser and on Windows, macOS and Linux.

* Blender, Maya and ZBrush are trademarks of their respective owners. Their names only describe the navigation styles and the program SplatStudy for Blender works in.