Modeler Forge

Modeler Forge builds a textured low-poly model out of orthographic reference images — the way props were made for Half-Life 2 and the engines of that era. You draw the outlines over your photos, press one button, and you get a closed, textured mesh you can export straight into an engine.

It runs entirely on your machine. No account, no sign-in, no cloud, no telemetry, and no internet connection — install it, unplug the network, and it works exactly the same. Nothing you model ever leaves your computer.

How it works

1. Drop your reference images in. One sheet, several photos, or a single atlas with every view on it — they all get packed into one working sheet.
2. Outline the views. Up to six: FRONT, BACK, LEFT, RIGHT, TOP and BOTTOM. Trace by hand node by node, drop in a rectangle or a circle, or let the automatic tracer find the silhouette — over the whole sheet, or inside a rectangle you drag.
3. Build the model. Two engines: Extrusion for flat pieces, and Volume, which intersects the views as a visual hull and decimates down to the triangle budget you ask for.
4. Export. The texture is built from your photos automatically: one atlas, one cell per view, with edge bleeding, and every face takes its colour from the view it actually faces.

What you get

• Six-view modelling, or as few as one.
• Two mesh engines and a triangle budget you set: 150, 900, 5000 — whatever the target engine can afford.
• A watertight check on every build: the header tells you whether the mesh is closed, and how many verts and tris it has.
• An automatic texture atlas from your reference photos, with per-face view routing and edge bleeding, so no face can ever show the background.
• A UV tab to fix what the automatic mapping got wrong: pick faces by clicking or by dragging a rectangle, then move, rotate and scale their UVs. Edits stay anchored to their atlas cell, so they survive rebuilding and adding objects.
• Direct mesh editing in the 3D view: pick parts, faces, edges or vertices and move, rotate or scale them, with welding so you never tear the mesh open.
• Scenes with several objects, each with its own outlines and its own position, rotation and scale. Duplicates share atlas cells, so four identical wheels cost one cell.
• Undo and redo, 80 steps, and projects you can save and reopen.
• A full manual built in (F1), and the whole interface in English and Spanish.

Export formats

• OBJ + MTL — the standard: Blender, 3ds Max, Unity, Godot, Unreal…
• MD2 — Quake II and everything built on it
• MD3 — Quake III, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Knight…
• MDL — Quake 1, with the original 256-colour palette
• SMD + QC — GoldSrc and Source, ready for studiomdl

Each one comes out as a .zip with its texture beside it, in the format that engine expects (256-colour BMP for GoldSrc, TGA, PNG). The binary writers are hand-written, and MD2 and MDL are read back with the reference parsers to check they are correct.

What's in the download

• ModelerForge-Setup-1.0.0.exe — Windows installer
• ModelerForge-1.0.0-portable.exe — Windows, no installation
• ModelerForge-1.0.0.AppImage — Linux, no installation
• ModelerForge-1.0.0-amd64.deb — Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives

Requirements

Windows 10 or later, or a 64-bit Linux desktop. The 3D view draws through WebGL, so any graphics chip your desktop already drives will do — there is nothing else to install.

Honest limits

This is a tool for low-poly props built from reference images. It does not do rigging, animation, sculpting or boolean modelling, and it is not trying to replace Blender — it replaces the tedious first hour of every prop. The GoldSrc/Source export gives you SMD + QC for studiomdl; it does not compile the binary model for you. Photos work best flat-on, evenly lit and on a plain background.

The reference sheets shown in the screenshots were generated with an image model; the tool itself ships no AI-generated content.