Fit and limits
What SculptScale does not do
This page is linked from the navigation rather than buried in the footer, because a few of these are expensive to discover late. Everything below is the present tense: it describes the tool as it is today, not as we hope it will be.
Read this one first
SculptScale has no idea what a stone is
This is the most important thing on this page, so it is not in a footnote.
There is no gem, stone, prong, bezel, pavé, girdle, culet or claw detection anywhere in SculptScale. Concretely, that means:
- Hollowing cannot tell a prong from a leaf.
- Ring-size scaling changes every stone seat diameter and says nothing about it.
- Validation never mentions settings — no prong count, no seat depth, no girdle clearance.
- Weights are metal only: no stones, no findings, no sprue or button.
- The cut planner avoids ornament by measuring geometric detail density — so a smooth cabochon bezel or a flat seat reads as low detail, which is exactly where it prefers to cut.
That last one is the expensive failure. A planner that avoids your ornament will happily cut through your seat.
The decision rule. If the value of the piece is in its metal — an idol, a plaque, a relief pendant, a signet, temple work — SculptScale is built for you and there is nothing here to work around. If the value of the piece is in its settings, keep that piece in your CAD package. Studios doing both send us the first kind and not the second, and that is the correct way to use this tool.
We would rather lose the sale than find this out together on a casting.
Measurement
What it measures, and what it does not
No thickness heat map. None.
There is no thickness colour map of any kind. You get the median wall and the thinnest 5% as numbers on the report, not a picture. A colour map is something we would like to build and have not built.
It does not inspect your sculpt
Thickness is only measured on shells SculptScale built. Above 400,000 faces the check on an upload is skipped entirely, and the report says it was skipped. SculptScale will not find thin spots in your model before hollowing — that is your CAD package's job.
Files
What it reads, and what it hands back
Upload directly
Convert first
There is no CAD kernel in this tool. The engine is
mesh-only, so Rhino .3dm, .step/.stp
and .iges are not read and never have been. Export STL or OBJ
from Rhino or MatrixGold and everything downstream works normally. We would
rather say this here than have you discover it at an upload dialog.
You get STL back, not your original format. Everything is converted to STL on ingest. Downloads are STL, OBJ or GLB. Keep your master.
Materials
Seven densities, and the ones that are missing
White and rose gold are not separate figures, and the difference is not small. 14k white sits near 14.6 g/cm³ against the 13.0 used here — so reading the 14k line as a white-gold weight puts you about 12% under. Do not.
Not listed: 9k, 10k, palladium, brass, bronze, fine 999 silver, stainless, resin. But the report prints the hollow volume in cm³, so any alloy is that number times your own density — and your refiner's figure beats ours. Weights are metal only: no stones, no findings, no sprue.
Scaling
What the scaler will not do
- No per-axis stretch. Every mode produces one uniform factor. There is no non-uniform distortion.
- It will not scale a hollow shell at all. This is deliberate — scaling multiplies the wall. Scale the solid, then hollow again. The sequence is explained here.
- Ring sizing is US only, by formula. There is no hole detection: it assumes the smaller of the two horizontal extents is the ring's inner diameter, and it can be wrong. No UK, EU, Japanese or Indian sizing. Measure the result before you cast it.
- Shrinkage is a number you supply. There is no table by metal or by investment. The trade usually works between 1.5% and 3%.
- Detail-loss warnings do not cover your own sculpt. Detail-survival scores, overlays and scale-down warnings only apply to relief SculptScale generated from your image. On an STL you modelled, there is nothing to compare against and no warning will appear.
Beta and thinly-developed paths
Things that work, but not yet well enough to build on
AI blockout from a photo
Beta. Every output carries this stamp: “AI blockout: topology and unseen side are invented — requires sculptor round-trip.” Output size is not read from your photograph — it is normalised to 60 mm and you rescale it. A starting mass for a sculptor, never a model to cast.
Photo detail transfer
It decorates only the surface facing the camera. The back and the sides receive nothing at all.
Ring band carrier
Plain rectangular-profile band only. No comfort fit, no tapered or knife-edge shank, no cathedral, no split shank. It is the least developed path in the tool and it has no test coverage. Do not build a collection on it.
The service itself
What a plan does not include
One shared access code per studio, created by hand. No self-signup, no individual logins, and no password reset — because there is no password. Approvals are still signed by name, so the audit trail works, but the licence is per studio rather than per seat.
There is no batch queue, no shared file library, no public API and no uptime guarantee. Jobs run one at a time. If those are what you need, we are not there yet.
Size ceiling
Memory is worked out per operation from the machine's provable limit, and the live figure for the server you would be using is published at /api/health. Check it before uploading a very large master rather than after. A file that will not fit is refused before anything is touched, with the numbers named and nothing changed.
The remedy for an over-ceiling master is decimating the export in your CAD package first — the refusal message says to what count. The identity audit then runs against the file you actually uploaded, so the guarantee is undamaged: a 23-million-triangle master decimated to 7.9 million came back with all 7,899,999 of its triangles proved unchanged.
Long jobs outlive your browser tab
A hollow on a multi-million-triangle master can take ten minutes. The connection your browser holds open is cut at five, so the page may report the job as failed while the server is still computing. The job is not lost. It finishes on the server and the new version appears in the piece's version list on its own — refresh after a few minutes before re-running anything. A proper progress view for long jobs is on the roadmap; until then this is what a “failed” long job usually is.
Wall floors
Between 0.20 and 0.50 mm the report states that the output is a reference for dies and electroforming rather than something to cast. That warning cannot be suppressed.
Roadmap
Three things we intend to build
Deliberately short, and deliberately undated. Everything else absent from this tool is described above in the present tense, because that is what it is.
A thickness colour map
Not available today. This is a list of intentions, not a schedule.
More ring-sizing standards
Not available today. This is a list of intentions, not a schedule.
Stone and setting awareness
Genuinely hard, and further off than the other two. Not available today. This is a list of intentions, not a schedule.
Sources
Where the outside numbers come from
Every figure attributed to SculptScale itself — wall measurements, metal savings, triangle counts, refusal messages — is the product's own output, quoted rather than paraphrased, and checked on 13 August 2026. Where a number came from one real job, we say which job.
Still open, and worth knowing. Our headline case was hollowed to 0.383 mm, which is below the casting floor the tool itself warns about. We are re-running the same piece at a castable 0.8 mm and will publish that figure alongside it rather than quietly replace it.
Still the right fit?
If you read all of that and your work is idols, relief, signets or temple pieces in solid metal, this tool was built for exactly you.