Re:Form 0.9.0 Alpha is the biggest release so far, and it touches almost every part of the studio. The Clay brush is rebuilt from the ground up. The viewport gets soft ambient occlusion, so the depth of a sculpt reads at a glance. Clip gets a freehand Lasso, and every clip now leaves clean, even triangles behind it. A shortcut bar puts Subdivide, Remesh and the mask tools one click away. Reflow finds a face's features by itself, Remesh keeps hard edges clean, renders get a Shading choice and a progress card, your Timeline survives every kind of save, and the studio opens seconds sooner.

This post walks through each of them: what changed, why it matters, and how to get the most out of it.

What version is Re:Form on now?

Re:Form is on v0.9.0 Alpha as of October 30, 2026. The release brings a new Clay brush, viewport ambient occlusion, Clip Lasso, cleaner clip caps, a shortcut bar along the bottom of the viewport, Reflow feature loops, cleaner Remesh edges, a Spherize tool, a Shading choice and progress card for renders, a Timeline that survives every kind of save, and a faster start.

To update, reload the page. There is nothing to install, and your saved projects and autosaves carry over. If you haven't tried Re:Form yet, open the studio in your browser.

What is new about the Clay brush?

Clay is the brush most sculptors live in, so it got the most attention in this release. It is rebuilt from the ground up.

How it used to work. Each dab of the old Clay brush pushed the surface under it up to one flat plane, laid through the middle of the dab. On a flat area that was fine. On a curve, the flat plane cut straight across the form, so a stroke over a ball left a flat slab on top of it, and a stroke over an edge left a shelf. Every dab also had a plane of its own, tilted a little differently from the one before, so a long stroke built up as a row of slightly different facets. That is what made old Clay strokes look rough and jagged when you built forms with them.

How it works now. When you start a stroke, Clay takes a copy of the surface as it is at that moment and lifts it by the clay height, each point straight out along its own surface direction. Every dab of the stroke fills toward that one lifted copy and stops there. Because the lifted copy has the same curves and corners as the surface under it, a stroke follows every curve and every edge it passes over: across a ball you get an even layer that stays round, and across an edge you get clay that wraps the edge instead of a shelf.

Why strokes now blend. Every dab of a stroke fills toward the same target, and a point that has already reached it is left alone. So going back and forth over an area does not keep stacking more clay, and the places where dabs overlap come out smooth instead of ridged. Laying several strokes side by side builds a smooth, continuous surface, the way real clay slabs pressed together do.

Inverted Clay. Hold Ctrl (or turn on Invert) and Clay cuts in by the same height instead of building up, following the form in the same way. It is a quick way to carve a smooth, even recess.

A few tips:

  • Strength sets how quickly each dab gets to the lifted surface; Size and the brush's height set how thick the layer is.
  • For thick build-ups, lay one stroke, lift the pen, and lay the next. Each new stroke starts from the surface as it is now, so layers add up stroke by stroke while staying smooth within a stroke.
  • Your old sculpts are not changed: only new Clay strokes use the new brush.

What does ambient occlusion in the viewport do?

Ambient occlusion darkens the places light has trouble reaching: the inside of creases, eye sockets, nostrils, the undersides of overhangs and the folds between forms. It is the soft shadow you see in the corners of a real room or in the cracks of a real clay model.

In 0.9.0 the viewport draws it while you sculpt, in every shading mode. Matcap, Lit and Unlit all get it. The effect is that the depth of a sculpt reads at a glance: a shallow crease you just carved shows as a crease, not as a faint change in shading, and you can judge forms without turning the model under a light.

It stays steady. The occlusion is worked out from what is on screen and steadied over several frames, so it does not crawl, flicker or sparkle while you sculpt or orbit. When you stop and the view holds still, it keeps refining for a few frames and comes out sharper and smoother, then the viewport goes idle again, just as before. An Undo clears the undone stroke's shading at once, with no ghost of the old crease left behind.

Settings. It is on by default. Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Graphics has:

  • Ambient occlusion, the switch.
  • Occlusion strength, how dark the occluded areas get.
  • Occlusion radius, how far the effect reaches: small for fine creases only, larger for broad soft shading between big forms.
  • Post-processing, which turns every screen effect off at once. Each effect keeps its own settings for when you turn it back on, so it is a quick way to compare.

If the viewport feels slow on an older graphics card, turning the occlusion down or off is the first thing to try.

Renders get it too. Render image, Render turntable and the session timelapse use the same occlusion at full quality, with their own Occlusion, Occlusion contrast and Occlusion size settings in the render window. Renders sample it from twice as many directions and three times as many steps as before, so soft cavities no longer show bands, and the same scene now renders to exactly the same picture every time.

How does Clip Lasso work?

Clip Lasso is a new brush in the Clip group, beside Clip Curve. It is the freehand way to cut.

  1. Pick Clip Lasso in the Clip group of the brush list.
  2. Draw a loop around the part you want to keep. The loop follows your pen or mouse exactly, so it can be any shape: the outline of a hand, a jagged break, a soft curve.
  3. Let go. Everything outside the loop is clipped away, and the cut is capped, so the mesh stays closed and ready to sculpt.

Hold Ctrl as you let go to cut away the inside of the loop instead, which punches a capped hole through the model. With Symmetry on, the loop is mirrored to the other side, so both sides are cut in one go.

Do clips leave cleaner geometry now?

Yes, and this applies to every Clip brush, not only the Lasso.

When a clip cuts through a mesh, it has to fill the opening with a cap and split the triangles that the cut runs through. Until now, both came out as runs of long, thin triangles: fans spreading out across the cap from its edge, and slivers along the rim wherever the cut passed close to a corner. Long, thin triangles shade badly, and a brush drags them around unevenly, so sculpting over a fresh cut was hard work.

After every cut, the studio now tidies the cap and the band of triangles along the rim. It swaps the shared edges of triangle pairs wherever that gives two better-shaped triangles, and evens out the points inside the cap so they spread across it. The shape of the cut is not changed at all: no point leaves the cut surface and nothing is added or taken away. Only the way the surface is divided into triangles changes. On a test sphere, the number of cap triangles with a corner sharper than 10 degrees went from 308 to 16 out of 1,390, and the average triangle on the cap became much closer to an even triangle.

You can sculpt, smooth and subdivide straight over a cut. And in the Wire view, the quads around a cut now show as quads, with their diagonals hidden as they should be.

What is the shortcut bar?

A bar along the bottom of the viewport, between the left toolbar and the right panel, with the commands you reach for most:

  • Subdivide ↑ and Subdivide ↓
  • Remesh, Decimate and Live Topology
  • Clear mask, Invert mask, Grow and Shrink
  • Sets from mask, Close holes and Mirror

These used to live in different sections of the right panel, so a typical session meant a lot of scrolling and unfolding. Now they are one click away, right under the model.

Each button does exactly what the same button in the right panel does, and shows the same state: greyed out when it cannot run (Subdivide ↓ on a mesh with no levels below, for example), lit when it is on (Live Topology). The arrow at the bar's right end folds the bar away when you want the whole viewport, and brings it back. The bar starts open each time the studio loads.

What changed in Reflow?

Reflow turns a sculpt into clean, even quads that follow its forms. You could already draw guides to tell it where rows of quads should run. In 0.9.0 it finds the most important ones by itself.

  • Feature loops. With the new Feature loops switch, on by default, Reflow traces a loop round every crease it finds, such as the eyes, the mouth, the ears or a deep fold, and lays rows of quads along it as if you had drawn a closed guide there. On a head, each eye, the mouth and each ear come out as a clean patch of quads ringed round the feature, which is the layout you want for animation or further sculpting. Your own drawn guides still come first, and Reflow lays its loops after them.
  • One loop per feature. A loop that would run the length of a fold, or sit right beside the loop round a longer crease, is left out, so a face gets the loops that matter and not a tangle of near-duplicates.
  • Detail density. A new switch, off to begin with, asks for smaller quads near the creases and larger ones away from them, with the total still at the Quads count. Turn it on when you want detail concentrated where the features are.
  • A simpler panel. Quads, the switches, Preview and Reflow stand at the top, which is all most Reflows need. Adaptive size, Smoothness, Guides and Density sit under an Advanced fold that remembers being opened.

Does Remesh keep sharp edges now?

Yes, and cleanly. Remesh rebuilds a mesh as an even grid of quads, and with Sharpness turned up it fits the grid's points onto the model's hard edges.

No more pinching. When a crease curved or ran diagonally through the remesh grid, a point fitted to the edge could be pulled so far that the triangles next to it folded over or collapsed into slivers, and the edge looked pinched. Now each point fitted to an edge moves only as far as its neighbouring triangles allow. On a cylinder rim at 100% Sharpness, that took the number of sliver triangles from 348 to none, and of folded triangles from 104 to none.

Even spacing along an edge. The points along a curved edge are now spaced evenly. They used to sit anywhere from a third of a grid step to a whole step apart, so the quads beside the edge came in alternating sizes, and the edge looked like a saw-tooth once it was smoothed or subdivided. A remeshed hard edge now stays a clean line through Smooth and Subdivide.

What else is new for sculpting?

  • Spherize. Tools ▸ Spherize… rounds the whole active layer toward a sphere about its middle. Amount sets how far: 100% puts every point on the sphere, 50% goes halfway, and below zero pushes points away from it. Radius sets how big the sphere is. The model shows the result as you drag, masked parts stay as they are, and Apply is one Undo. It is handy for rounding off a rough blockout, or for turning a box into a soft pillow shape.
  • Plane brushes hold steady with big stamps. Flatten, Fill, Scrape and the other plane brushes work out their plane from everything under the brush. With a very large stamp on a very dense mesh, such as dragging a big alpha across tens of millions of triangles, the sums behind that plane could overflow, and the plane suddenly jumped to a strange angle. They now hold any size of stamp on any mesh.
  • Flatten levels right up to an edge. Flattening a face beside an edge no longer lifts the next face up onto the plane, which used to grow the face out over the edge as a lip. On a rounded form the flat face no longer creeps out over the side. The rounding into an edge still fills flat, right up to the edge, so you get crisp planes without spilling.
  • Tool windows take any value. In Surface noise and Reshape, click a slider's number and type a value. It can go past the slider's end, and the slider widens to hold it. Surface noise's Scale now runs to 100% and its Strength to 20 either way.

What is new in Blockout?

  • Discard strokes. When you leave Blockout for a brush with strokes you haven't finished, the question now offers Discard strokes beside Finish: the strokes go, nothing is built, and you are straight on the brush.
  • Finish goes back to the brush. Finish blockout builds the mesh, leaves Blockout and picks the Brush tool, ready to sculpt what you just built.
  • Curve resolution. A new slider under Twist sets how many rings a curve is built from along its length, from 1 to 10. Lower values give lighter, faceted tubes; higher values give smoother ones. A selected curve takes the new value and is rebuilt, and the setting is saved with the curve.
  • Mesh Sets from Blockout. Each piece drawn in Blockout becomes its own Mesh Set, also when pieces are joined, so you can mask, hide or pose each piece on its own afterwards.
  • Fit in Blockout. F frames the blocked-out pieces you are building.

Can I choose how a render is shaded?

Yes. Render image and Render turntable have a Shading choice: Matcap, Lit or Unlit. It starts on whatever the viewport shows when the window opens, so a Matcap sculpt no longer comes out as a white Lit render by surprise, and you can switch to Lit for a studio-light look whenever you want. The Preview window follows the same choice.

A progress card. While a render works, a card shows what it is doing: which pass it is on, and the frame or percentage of a turntable, with a moving bar. It disappears as the result appears.

No more caught glides. With Smooth camera on, a render started while the view is still gliding waits for the glide to finish, instead of catching its passes from slightly different places.

Is my Timeline kept when I save?

Yes, now in every kind of save. The Timeline is the record of how a sculpt was made, stroke by stroke, that you can scrub back through and share. Until now it was kept only beside a cloud project, and only when signed in.

In 0.9.0:

  • A .clay file saved to your computer carries its Timeline, and opening it brings the Timeline back.
  • The browser's autosave, and so crash recovery, keeps the Timeline too.
  • An opened cloud project shows its earlier history straight away, instead of only after its next save.

Nothing lost around saves and layers. A batch of fixes makes saving safer:

  • The autosave waits for a layer switch, a merge or a save to finish, so it never saves a half-switched project.
  • A stroke made while an autosave uploads still counts as unsaved, so it is saved next time instead of being lost.
  • A single-layer project keeps its layer's name, visibility, pivot and symmetry settings when it is opened again.
  • Undo keeps hidden Mesh Sets hidden.
  • Undo and Redo wait while a subdivide, a level switch or a layer operation runs, instead of stepping into the middle of it.
  • On big meshes, Grab updates only the surface around the pull after each move, and recording a huge stroke for Undo stays within the graphics card's memory.

Does the studio start faster?

Yes, noticeably. Before you can sculpt, the studio has to prepare well over a hundred small programs for your graphics card. The loading screen used to wait for all of them.

Now it prepares the ones a first sculpt needs first, clears the loading screen as soon as those are ready, and prepares the rest behind the start screen, with a slim bar at its foot that fades when it is done. On a first visit, the loading screen now clears after about 8.7 seconds instead of 14; on later visits, after about 2.4 seconds instead of 3. Starting a sculpt is as quick as before.

The start screen also fits any window now. It never scrolls, the tiles size to the window, and a fullscreen button sits in the top right corner.

What changed in the studio's layout?

  • Tool names on the left toolbar. Each tool button shows its name under its icon, so you no longer have to hover to find a tool.
  • A tidy right panel to start. A new project opens with Brush and Layers unfolded and the other sections folded. A click on a section's title opens or folds it.
  • Topology up with Brush. The Topology section sits just under Brush, above Mask, with Remesh under it, because they are used together.
  • Change brush. The brush preview in the right panel carries a Change brush button, and clicking the preview itself still opens the brush list. Escape closes the list; with text in its search box, the first Escape clears the text.
  • Stroke type. The stroke dropdown is called Stroke type, and its first choice reads Freehand.
  • A new number font. Numbers in the studio are set in Azeret Mono, which lines digits up neatly in readouts and sliders.
  • Scrollbars in the studio's look. Thin and rounded, in dark and light, in Firefox and Chrome.
  • Light mode is easier on the eyes. The start screen and the loading screen are a shade darker in light mode.

What was fixed?

  • The Windows key. Holding the Windows key no longer turns on Invert. Only Ctrl does, and on a Mac, Command.
  • An alpha picked for a tool. Picking an image for Surface noise or for Blockout's Alpha profile no longer ends up on the brush as well.
  • Zoom after Fit. After F, the scroll wheel zooms into the model's centre instead of sliding the model away.
  • The Wire view after a clip. Quads beside a fresh cut show as quads, with no stray diagonals and no missing edges.
  • Gallery order. The gallery lists the newest sculpts first.
  • Behind the scenes. The limits on shared links and cloud projects are now checked more strictly on our servers.

What should I know before relying on it?

  • Re:Form is in alpha. Things change between releases. Browser autosave and saves to your account protect your work, and the status bar tells you which of the two holds your latest change.
  • Ambient occlusion can be turned off. If the viewport feels slow on an older graphics card, turn the occlusion down or off in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Graphics.

The previous release notes are in what's new in Re:Form 0.8.10 Alpha. The plans are compared on the pricing page: Pro is $9.99 a month or $99 a year and goes to 80 million triangles.

FAQ

How do I use Clip Lasso?

Pick Clip Lasso in the Clip group of the brush list, draw a loop around the part you want to keep and let go. Everything outside the loop is clipped away and the cut is closed. Hold Ctrl while you let go to cut away the inside instead.

Why does the new Clay brush feel different?

It fills toward a lifted copy of the surface instead of pushing up to a flat plane, so it follows curves and edges and blends where strokes overlap. To build thicker, lift the pen between strokes: each new stroke starts from the surface as it is now.

How do I turn off ambient occlusion in the viewport?

Open Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Graphics and switch off Ambient occlusion, or switch off Post-processing to turn off every screen effect at once.

Can I hide the shortcut bar?

Yes. The arrow at the right end of the bar folds it away, and the same arrow brings it back. The bar opens again the next time the studio loads.

Does Reflow need guides now?

No, but they still help. With Feature loops on, Reflow finds the eyes, mouth, ears and deep folds by itself. Draw your own guides where you want rows to run that it cannot guess, and it lays its own loops after yours.

Does the new Clay brush change my old sculpts?

No. Sculpts are kept exactly as they were. Only new Clay strokes use the new brush.