3D sculpting on a Chromebook without a workaround.

The old answer to "can I do 3D on a Chromebook" was some version of no, followed by a workaround. Enable Linux and try to build Blender. Sideload an Android app and accept the performance. Use a remote desktop into a machine that can actually do the work. All three are the kind of advice that assumes the reader wanted a project rather than a sculpt.

What changed is WebGPU. Browsers now expose modern GPU capability directly to web applications — compute shaders, real buffers, the primitives a sculpting engine needs — and ChromeOS is, of all platforms, the one where the browser is the whole operating system. Mold displaces vertices on the same WebGPU device that renders the viewport, so brush strokes on a dense mesh stay responsive rather than crawling through a compatibility layer.

This matters most in the place Chromebooks are most common. Schools buy them by the cart, and the traditional 3D curriculum problem is that the software will not install on the hardware the students have, cannot be administered per-device, and licences per seat. A tool that is a URL removes every part of that: no install, no admin request, no per-machine licence, and student work that lives in an account rather than on whichever machine they happened to pick up.

The honest limit is hardware. Many Chromebooks have modest integrated graphics, which sets a ceiling on how far you can subdivide before strokes start to feel heavy. Blocking out form, mid-level detail, remeshing and export are all comfortable; a multi-million-triangle pore pass is not what these machines are for. Mold checks for WebGPU when you arrive and says so plainly if the device can't provide it, rather than failing halfway through a stroke.