One of the best, albeit pricy, purchases I've made for myself as an artist has been the IPad/Apple Pencil combo. Not even a Cintiq can touch just how natural and responsive the Apple Pencil feels, nor can Photoshop hold a candle to how easy it is to just get in there and start drawing in Procreate. After a few years of happily doodling away on this thing, it only just recently occurred to me to check if there are any sculpting programs on the IPad and there were! The one I went with is called Nomad.
Nomad is available on both Apple and Android and costs $14.99 which is a one time fee. This is an absolute steal considering that this is basically a pocket ZBrush, which goes for almost $900.
So lets get into it! When you open a new project in Nomad, it instantly kicks you off with a sphere (though you can change it up to a cube or cylinder or torus or ?icosahedron? among a few others) nestled between a few fairly self explanatory toolbars. I've labeled them here.
The UI in this program is simply just... amazing. It's such a breath of fresh air after dealing with the 500 nestled menus in ZBrush. Everything is very clean and clear and oriented so that you can quickly change brush size/intensity with your free hand as you sculpt, and got all your different brush options where you'd be resting your drawing hand (you can flip this if you're lefthanded). It makes the sculpting process feel fairly mindless.
Another thing I love about the UI is that Nomad uses the same 2 finger double tap = undo and 3 finger double tap = redo inputs that Procreate does, as well as the pinching/expanding finger gestures to zoom in and out on the sculpt. All these simple, intuitive controls make the sculpting experience feel more fluid which is great because sculpting can get overwhelming real quick, especially if you're a beginner.
Now lets talk features: Nomad has a surprisingly diverse amount of utility, providing all the core features you'd need to do some serious sculpting such as:
- Multi-res sculpting
- Voxel remeshing (dynamesh equivalent, subdivision, and dynamic topology tool)
- Vertex painting (base color, roughness, metalness)
- Brush customization
- Importing custom alphas
- PBR lighting
- Rendering/post-processing
- Layers
- OBJ export
So to test this thing out, I decided to just roll with a portrait to get a feel for all the tools. I gelled with it pretty quickly since it has all the brushes I'm accustomed to using regularly on Zbrush, like clay, flatten (aka trim dynamic), smooth, move, drag (aka snakehooks), inflate, crease, and masking. Scupting with the Apple pencil is honestly a dream - it's so responsive it makes sculpting so much fun. Here's what I ended up with in around an hour of getting a feel for everything and aimlessly pushing a sphere around.
Performance-wise, one hour of sculpting actually didn't crater my battery life at all, which was really surprising. I started off around 85% and finished the sculpt with 71%. My Ipad felt a little warm but overall, I'm really impressed by how light this program manages to be despite holding fairly dense meshes. This one is about 1.09mil polys, but I only ended up with 3 subtools so maybe with multiple dense layers the battery life won't be as hearty.
After sculpting, I tried their painting tools out. I haven't really used Zbrush's polypainting much aside from using it to create polygroups so I can't really compare them, but I really enjoyed painting in Nomad! Its pretty straightforward and it's easy to just mess around with colors and blend/build things up. You can also paint using the layer system which is pretty handy if you're not a destructive, single layer kind of gal like me.
With colors done, I went to try out the lighting and post-processing features in Nomad and was honestly really impressed by what they had. I threw in and fudged around with 2 lights (which are on their own layers where you can change their intensity and color), picked an HDRI map from a pretty nice and versatile collection, then moved on to their post-processing options. They had all of my favorite stuff like bloom, chromatic aberration, depth of field, and color-grading which is a must. Aside from those they also have curvature (uses bump and cavity maps to create an interesting linework effect), tone mapping, vignette, grain and sharpness.
Here's my render. Nomad lets you render images at up to 4K resolution and gives you little options like rendering a transparent background or with the interface visible.
After a couple of hours of messing around with Nomad, I can easily see this being an app I use to get all of my big shapes done in done in, then bring home to ZBrush for all the nitty-gritty detail work. It's so comfortable and easy to use, and the portability makes it a big plus for me. As much as I love sculpting, it does get kind of depressing after a full day of being chained in my desk. Nomad lets me be...well, nomadic, and exist with others while I get some work done. It's also amazingly special to have a pocket sculpting sketchbook!
A downside to Nomad (aside from not being a crazy workhorse like Zbrush) is that there's basically no documentation due to the newness of the app, but there are still plenty of Youtube tutorials out there to get your feet wet and a very enthusiastic community of users. At the end of the day, Nomad's not a replacement for professional grade sculpting packages like Zbrush but it's certainly on the trajectory to become that one day. For now though, it's an awesome tool to do some really nice looking sketches that you can expand upon elsewhere, anywhere.
Here's a great video that breaks down the key features in the program for beginners: https://youtu.be/0B4YRc3fAgA
And here's some work created on Nomad by other artists:
By Matthew Kean (rendered in Keyshot)
By Follygon
By Nomad artists
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