Who Is This For?
If you’re a 3D artist who wants to sculpt characters without being chained to a desk, this guide is for you. With just an iPad and two affordable apps, you can build production-ready character meshes from your couch — with proper topology suitable for rigging in Maya or Blender.
I’m Grif, a technical animator with 20 years in the games industry. Clean topology has always been a priority for me, because characters that can’t be rigged properly aren’t much use in a game or a streaming setup. This workflow is how I do it on the go.
The Apps You Need
You can get both apps for under $50 total, which makes this one of the most accessible professional sculpting setups available.
Nomad Sculpt is where you’ll do your actual sculpting. Think of it as a mobile alternative to ZBrush — not a replacement, but a genuinely powerful tool for building your base mesh and adding detail. Get it here!
Cozy Blanket is where you’ll handle your retopology. It makes drawing clean quad-based topology over your sculpt fast and intuitive. Get it here!
Step 1: Sculpt Your Base Mesh in Nomad Sculpt
Start simple. You don’t need a complex sculpt to learn the workflow — even a basic face shape will do.
One thing to be aware of is Dyntopo (Dynamic Topology). It’s a useful sculpting tool, but it tessellates your mesh in an unpredictable way that makes rigging difficult. The built-in Quad Mesh option is better, but the topology it generates is still not ideal for rigging — particularly for faces where edge flow really matters.
This is exactly why we bring in Cozy Blanket.
Once you’re happy with your sculpt, select your mesh and export it as an OBJ. On iPad, you’ll get the option to open it directly in Cozy Blanket.
Step 2: Retopologize in Cozy Blanket
Cozy Blanket makes retopology straightforward. Enable Mirror Mode and start placing faces over your mesh. You’re essentially drawing clean, intentional topology directly over your sculpt.
When you’re done, hit Apply Symmetry to join the mirrored halves. Before you export, do a quick check — undo and redo to confirm that your edge vertices are properly merged. If they aren’t, you’ll see the mesh split apart when you bring it back into Nomad Sculpt, and you’ll need to come back and fix it.
Once everything looks good, export the retopologized mesh back to Nomad Sculpt and add it to your scene.
Step 3: UV Unwrap Before You Go Further
This is the step a lot of people skip — don’t. UV unwrap your mesh right after retopology, before you add any additional sculpted detail or texturing. It’s much harder to do cleanly afterward.
In Nomad Sculpt, use the Face Groups tool to define seams, then head to the UV section under Miscellaneous. You’ll find three options:
- UV Unwrap
- UV Atlas
- BFF
For most use cases, UV Atlas is the go-to. It’s not the most precise method, but it’s fast and gets the job done at this stage of the workflow.
Once your UVs are laid out, you’re free to subdivide your mesh, sculpt in finer detail, paint, and eventually bake a normal map — which we’ll cover in a future video.
What’s Coming Next
This was just an introduction to the workflow. In upcoming videos we’ll go deeper, including:
- How to export and bake normal maps from Nomad Sculpt
- A full breakdown of Nomad Sculpt’s tools
- Advanced Cozy Blanket tips, including how to pull multiple edges at once
If this kind of content is useful to you, subscribe and stay tuned.
