What It Is

Pgon is a digital sculpting toolset for teaching and learning. There is a smooth ball of polygons, you push them around.

It is not for production work. It is small, simple, hopefully something you can wrap your head around, arranged so the ideas underneath stay visible and cascade.

Press and hold any control and it says what it is in plain words, and what the same idea is called elsewhere. The software is disposable, subdivision levels are bulletproof.

How It Adds Up

It starts as a cage of quads. Subdivide the cage and every face becomes four, smoother, closer to the surface. The coarser cage is still underneath, still editable. Sculpt at a coarse level and the detail above follows. Sculpt fine detail at the top and it survives the trip back down and up again.

That relationship, between a control mesh and the surface it produces, is most of what there is to learn here. Which is why the mesh is a real one: strict Catmull-Clark, closed and manifold at every level.

Eventually the topology stops cooperating. Pull a horn out of a sphere and the quads stretch until they are no longer quads in any useful sense. Remesh rebuilds it all.

Pgon - horns pulled out of a sphere, the quad cage visible over the surface, masked regions in red

Radiating.

What It Does

What it does

Build, move, smooth, inflate, crease, pinch, flatten, hook, swirl, and a brush whose falloff you draw yourself
Catmull-Clark subdivision levels, with detail that propagates between them
Masking, and symmetry on X, Y, Z and radial in any combination
Deformations that take hold of the whole form at once - taper, twist, bend, squeeze, spherize, gravity
Twenty surface patterns - fields the form sits inside rather than images wrapped around it - at any grain and wall thickness
A cage: the form becomes a basket of tubes along the boundaries between its own cells, in five patterns, and it stays live until you bake it
Protrusions grown over a surface - six forms, clumped or scattered, with an understorey - also live until baked
Three ways to remesh, each of which says what it would cost and refuses what it cannot carry
Booleans, merge and split across several objects
Sculpt layers, vertex painting, posing
Export to FBX with the ladder intact, to OBJ, or to GoZ and straight into ZBrush

What it does differently

Every control explains itself on a press and hold, and names what the idea is called elsewhere
Five tiers that remove tools rather than greying them, so the first hour is small on purpose
Symmetry is also a pattern tool - mirrors and a radial array stack, and one stroke lands in every copy at once
Surface noise is a field the form sits inside, not an image wrapped around it, so it has no seam and reads the same at any size
A deformation slider is a gesture, not a setting: drag to see it, let go and it has happened, and the slider goes back to zero
Search that takes the word you actually typed - ask for “smoother” or “dig in” and it finds the tool
Refuses an operation that would break the subdivision ladder, and says what it would have cost
Measures what a remesh actually did to your form - how much relief survived, how many separate pieces came back as one - and tells you before you press, not after
Survives being closed mid-stroke - a snapshot and journal underneath, so a shut tab is not an event
Runs with the network off, from a home-screen icon, on hardware nobody would call a workstation

What it is not doing

Competing. The production tools are better and it is not close
Painting through a full texture pipeline - vertex color only
Dynamic topology that refines under the brush as you go
Accounts, cloud storage, collaboration
A native build. The browser is the platform

Pgon - the full tool panel at the highest tier beside a sculpted form, radial symmetry set to six

Everything at once, which is the last tier and not the first.

Pgon - a sphere covered in fifteen hundred rounded protrusions, longer toward the silhouette and shorter facing the light

Fifteen hundred shoots, grown over the surface as a separate object. Still live: every slider re-grows them until you bake it.

Closing

Pgon is still becoming. It runs, it exports, it holds through a browser crash and it has been measured on every screen size I can emulate. More soon always.

Pgon - a sphere turned into a lattice of smooth tubes following the boundaries between Voronoi cells, joints rounded, seen against black

A cage. The form becomes the boundaries between its own cells, piped and filleted.

For videos of the work in progress, follow me on Instagram.