Designo is a metaball-first blobjectery — a workshop for making blobjects. You don't build topology; you drop soft primitives into space and let them fuse, like clay, into smooth organic forms. It's for the early, exploratory part of product and jewelry design, where the form matters more than the mesh.
How to use it
- Add a form — click a primitive in the top rail: sphere, capsule, torus, cone, box, cylinder, Poly (a polygon prism — set its Sides 3–33, turn it into a Star, or Taper it to a point for a pyramid; Round softens the edges), and Wire (a freeform tube — see below). It drops into the scene.
- Wire (the curve icon at the end of the rail) is a freeform tube through movable points — it resolves as one smooth tapering curve, so you can shape a cherry stem, a vine, a handle or an arm in a single stroke. It starts as a gentle 3-segment arc; drag the pink dots in the scene to bend it, and in the inspector set the number of Points, the Joint blend (how rounded the bends are), and a Thickness per point (taper it thick-to-thin). It fuses, booleans, colours, weighs and exports like any other form.
- Fuse — move two forms near each other and they melt into one body (osmotic union). Subtract carves instead.
- Select — click any form. Its wireframe ghost lights up and the gumball appears.
- Gumball (all live at once, no mode switching): colored arrows move along an axis · rings turn · cubes resize that axis · the white center drags freely on screen · the amber cube scales uniformly. Hover any handle and a label names what it does.
- Inspector (right): switch Add / Subtract / Intersect, set this form's Color and Smoothness, and tune its shape (a torus's radius & thickness, a cone's tip, a box's roundness…). Tap any value to type it exactly. For a hard, un-fused join, set Smoothness to 0. Remove it from here.
- Color tints each form; pigment shaders blend the colors where two forms fuse.
- Blend × (bottom) multiplies every form's smoothness at once — 1 = each at its own setting, >1 = molten, 0 = crisp. Edge chooses how every join is shaped: Fillet (a rounded edge) or Chamfer (a flat 45° bevel); the smoothness sets its size. Fillet is the default soft-clay look; Chamfer gives a faceted, machined edge.
- Shell hollows the body to a thin wall — per-form in the inspector, or globally with the Shell toggle & slider next to Blend ×. It lightens the piece (and drops the ring's metal weight).
- Bend & Twist (bottom bar) warp the whole body — Bend curves it along its length (the side-profile arc), Twist spirals it around that axis. Both are live; center is straight. Flatware comes with a gentle bend already; push it further or zero it.
- Shader (bottom-left) opens a searchable library of looks — Gloss, Matte, Glass, Chrome, Gold, Copper, Pearl, Toon, Velvet, Carbon, Wax, Jade, Zebra (surface-fairness stripes), Wire, Hidden-line, Wind, Iso, Heat, Holo, X-ray, Glow and a Normals debug view. Type to filter (the names from Points — Emrld → Chrome, ZBRA → Zebra, Shade → Matte, HLR → Hidden-line — match too). Reflections and light come from a real photographic studio environment, so metals read like jewelry.
- Mirror reflects one half of space across a fold plane for symmetric rings & pendants — turn it on and pick the X / Y / Z axis (build the +side, get both). Grid toggles the ground plane & contact shadow — the floor drops automatically below taller pieces. ⟨ hide panels (top of the toolbar) tucks the left palettes into a drawer for smaller screens — a panels ▸ tab on the left edge brings them back.
- Builders ▾ is one menu that holds the parametric generators, listed by what they make — Jewelry → Ring, Grow → Tree / Figure / Creature, World → Terrain, Type → MetaText (more to come; the Flatware builders are out for rework). Pick one to start it; each opens its own panel of real-world controls.
- Ring (Builders → Ring) is a one-piece ring builder: a finger-hole mandrel at your chosen US size is a locked subtract, so everything you add fuses into a wearable band with a true bore. Pick a metal and spot price for a live weight + melt-value estimate (metal only — no labor/stones). Turn on a Stone (optional) for a faceted round-brilliant gem in a 4-prong, 6-prong or bezel setting — set its carat (the diameter follows) and prong/wall size. The prongs/bezel are real metal, fused into the band as one body and counted in the weight; the gem is a visual placeholder (you set a real stone), so it's listed separately by carat in the panel and every export manifest, not printed. Undo to leave.
- Flatware (Builders → Spoon/Fork/Knife) builds cutlery as jointed wire bodies — the same skeleton-and-skin machinery as the pear tree, with as few joints as a nice form allows (a spoon is five; the knife is one wire of five points whose segments carry width and thickness separately, so the blade runs wide and thin while the handle stays oval; the fork's four tine tips are joints of their own). The spoon's bowl is one dished compound — an ellipsoid with the scoop differenced out. Dial Length (real mm) / Width / Thick plus the piece's own dial (bowl depth · tine spread · blade width), pick a Style (Classic, Midcentury, Biomorphic, Sphere finial, Surreal), then drag any joint dot to bend the neck, splay a tine, curve the blade — the skin follows and the weight re-computes from the posed body (metal × posed-mesh volume, commodity prices editable). Poses ride ◆ keyframes; melted joins the clay field; ◍ bakes it solid. The idea: a base with easy deformability — sliders for the proportions, joints for the gesture.
- Grow (Builders → Tree / Figure / Creature) is the generative builder: a stochastic L-system grows a tree — pick the species (Pear · Aspen · the columnar quaking aspen · Fig · broad and gnarly) in the panel; leaves and fruit, never the same twice (↻ reroll) — or a Vitruvian figure (its joints carry human motion limits so a limb can't bend past a real range, and the head is sized to the build), or a creature — pick the animal (Canine · Seahorse · Octopus). All are built from a skeleton fused into one smooth skin, with printable proportions. Tick Dyad (on a tree or a creature) to grow a tree and an animal together, side by side, chosen at random — one body you can pose, melt and export as a pair. Drag the joint dots to pose (the skin follows live), flip View → wire to see the bones, and choose what the body IS: solo (a fast posable body), melted (it joins the metaball field — primitives fuse into it under Blend ×, booleans carve it, weight & exports include it, still posable), or ◍ bake to clay (freeze the pose as a captured form). Poses ride ◆ keyframes and the animated ABC export. A tree can also be DIRECTED: pick a ⌖ Target form in the Grow panel and the branches grow toward it — each step reads the target's distance field and bends home by the Bias dial (0 = free growth, 1 = pure homing); a branch that reaches the target plants a small contact node and grabs on. Roots reaching for ground, setting claws closing on a stone, vessels finding an organ — pick the form, slide the Bias, and reroll. Console types can grow custom forms via designoGrow().
- Terrain (Builders → World → Terrain) raises a seeded ground under your work — mounds and far ridges over an island that melts into the floor (↻ reroll for new land). Dig opens a hole where the pink dot sits (drag the dot to place it) with the soil heaped at the rim — bury something, then keyframe Dig with ◆ and the ground closes back over it. Relief, Spread, Dig and Heap all animate. It's scenery: rendered in Rendre as a Soil part (drop any material on it), but never counted in weight or exports — those stay your piece.
- MetaText (Builders → Type → MetaText) casts whatever you type in clay — a monoline stroke alphabet (lowercase, space, period) fused into one smooth body. Dial Size, stroke Weight and Blend; set Body to melted and the text joins the metaball field, where a keyframed Blend × condenses the word out of a molten mass — or melts it back into one. Renders in Rendre as a MetaText part. Console types: designoMetaText('word').
- Infill ▦ (Builders → Structure → Infill) fills the body's interior with a space-filling lattice — the way you'd lighten a part in Grasshopper, nTopology or an Adidas 4D midsole, but live. Tick fill the body with a lattice and pick a pattern: the classic triply-periodic minimal surfaces — Gyroid (springy, isotropic), Schwarz-P (open cubic), Diamond (stiff), Neovius (dense) — an Octet truss (a regular strut lattice), Voronoi struts (an organic, irregular open-cell wire — soft-blended junctions), a Strut lattice · 4D (the sheared body-diagonal weave of an Adidas 4D midsole), Voronoi foam · 3D (rounded cell-edge pipes with open windows, a Nervous System print), or a Spinodal · GRF (a smooth isotropic open-cell resin lattice, the Carbon-DLS look). Set the Cell size (mm) and the Wall / strut thickness. Core grades the density from the surface inward: 100% is an even fill, 0% hollows the core into a surface cage. Region grade varies the density across the model along an axis — dense (stiff) at one end, open (soft) at the other, exactly how a printed midsole is tuned. Stretch elongates (or flattens) the cells along an axis for the oriented, directional look of a 4D midsole — it applies to every pattern. A Solid skin keeps a solid outer wall and lattices only the core (the printable shell-and-infill). For Voronoi you also get two toggles — inside (the strut fill) and surface (a Voronoi cell-edge cage with open holes, like a Nervous System print) — and because both are built from the same cells, the interior struts and the surface cage are one coherent structure. Everything fuses, weighs and exports as one lattice solid, and the renderer shows exactly what you'll print (raise the Cell size for export-clean walls). Console: window.__setInfill(on,type,cellMm,wall,skinMm), __setInfillCore(c), __setVorModes(inside,surface), __setInfillGrad(axis,lo,hi).
- Grata ⊞ (Builders → ⊞ Grata, or Infill → pattern Grata / Rombo) makes a screen: instead of filling a body with a 3-D cell it lays a flat grid of solid bars and bores the windows clean through, the way a Milan citofono panel, a palazzo facade grille, an expanded-metal grata or a Duomo tracery window is cut — your window "generable with wires," a 2-D node-and-edge net rendered as fused struts. Put it on a thin slab (an Arch or a flattened Box) and pick Grata (a square grid) or Rombo (the grid rotated 45° into a diamond mesh) — or put it on a thin disc / cylinder and pick Rosa, a polar wheel of radial spokes and concentric rings: a Duomo rose window, its petal count following the Cell dial (or set the Spokes dial to decouple the petals from the ring pitch). Tick cusped foils for a ring of lobed sub-lights — trefoil, quatrefoil, cinquefoil or sexfoil (the Foil dial), the cusps where adjacent lobe-arcs meet, exactly as Gothic tracery is struck with a compass. Cell is the window pitch, Wall the bar width; the solid skin is dropped so the windows pass through. It fuses, weighs and exports as one solid and the render is exactly the cut panel. The geometry is plain implicit distance — perpendicular plane-sets unioned, evaluated in the field — so it stays parity-clean between the screen, the weight and the print. (Gothic tracery and the perforated stone screen are an old idea — the transenna and the Islamic jali — here generated rather than carved.)
- Antigranulator ⦂ (Builders → Structure → Antigranulate) scatters a field of soft dimples, bumps or through-holes across the body's skin — a grater's perforation, but un-granulated: every edge is rounded and wet, not sharp (inspired by the Alessi/Zaha "Forma" grater and Yves Béhar / Jawbone surface texture). Pick a Mode (Dimple pits · Bump pimples · Through-hole), set the Cell spacing, the Diameter (feature size as a fraction of spacing), Depth (for dimples/bumps) and a little Dropout for organic irregularity; mixed sizes interleaves big and small holes for the hand-made Alessi look. For real through-holes turn on Shell first (a thin wall to pierce) — on a solid body the hole mode reads as deep pits. It fuses, weighs and exports as one solid. Console: window.__setAntigran(on,mode,cellMm,dia,depthMm,mix,drop).
- Pomice ⦿ (Builders → Structure → Pomice) bores a vesicular-stone skin into any blob — a froth of rounded cavities at two scales with a grainy matrix between, the look of Roman travertine, tufo and pumice seen all over the Triennale and the Milan pavements. Set the Pore spacing and Cavity Ø; swing Coarse from a fine pumice froth to big open tufo holes; raise Irregular to break the matrix into bridges; Grain adds the micro-roughness of the un-pored stone. Presets Tufo (open) and Pumice (dense). Unlike the Antigranulator's regular dot lattice, Pomice is bimodal and broken — a real froth, not a perforation. Fuses, weighs and exports as one solid. Console: window.__setPomice(on,{cellMm,depthMm,dia,big,drop,rough}). · IT: Pomice — pietra vescicolare (travertino · tufo · pomice): cavità tonde su due scale con matrice granulosa.
- ◐ Rendre (top of the toolbar) is the rendering room — a real path tracer. Your sculpt (or an imported OBJ / glTF / Rhino 3DM, or a dropped file) lands auto-scaled on an infinite studio floor; light it by swapping the environment (33 studios — 28 synthesized in-house + 5 Poly Haven CC0, plus the built-in default; drag any .hdr or image onto the canvas to use it — images are expanded to true HDR), with Rotation / Height / Intensity dials; dress it from the materials drawer (577 PBR materials + a Marmo shelf of 20 procedural Italian marbles — drag a swatch onto a part, or select-then-click; search speaks both languages: “glass” finds Lucida, “gold” finds Aurum, “marmo” finds the marbles); right-click any part — the floor too — to edit its PBR live (color, metal, rough, glass, coat, sheen, glow) — and on a marble the same right-click opens the stone editor (structure, vein & clast colour, vein scale, contrast, warp, redox, clast size, speckle, hue, seed). Behind the model you see an infinity surround in the floor's own material (toggle to see the environment image). ⬇ Save scene… writes one .designo with the model AND the whole render setup; ⬆ To Rhino / Blender… hands the scene onward as a GLB — named parts at true scale, every material in Cycles' own PBR vocabulary (so Rhino 8 and Blender re-render it with the same math, not a reinterpretation), the camera, and the lighting setup as a cited reference with its license attached; the dialog states exactly what travels and what stays, and the same caveats ride inside the file. ⬇ Render… saves a PNG up to 4K. One undo history runs through both rooms, ⟲ Clear works in both rooms (in Rendre it clears the stage, imports included), and leaving the render room with an import on stage asks whether to capture it as clay (the same SDF capture as ⤓ Import) or leave it there for rendering.
- Marmo (Rendre → materials → Marmo) is a shelf of 20 procedural Italian marbles — Bianco Carrara, Calacatta Oro, Statuario, Arabescato, Pavonazzetto, Bardiglio, Giallo & Rosso Antico, the imperial porphyries, Verde Alpi, Serpentinite, Africano, Breccia, Ophicalcite Rosa (the Milano Cadorna stone), Nero, Nero Marquina, Portoro, Travertino Romano and Botticino. Each is computed by world position (no texture seams, true at any scale) in one of five rock structures: veined, clouded, breccia, speckled (porphyry) and uniform. Colour is the rock's chemistry — red and pink are hematite (oxidised iron, Fe³⁺), green is reduced iron in serpentine (Fe²⁺), white is the calcite vein — and a breccia re-runs the rock's formation as a redox map: reduced clasts in an oxidised matrix, with a calcite vein net rimming the clasts. Right-click a marble part to push any of it (the stone editor). The marble engine is ported from Marezzo, the standalone Italian-marble generator built on the MARMORAIO field-capture study (Venezia & Milano, June 2026). · IT: Marmo — venti marmi italiani procedurali; il colore è chimica (ematite Fe³⁺ rosso/rosa · serpentino Fe²⁺ verde · calcite bianca).
- Save / Load keep your sketch as a re-editable .designo file (honest JSON inside; saves from the Rendre side carry the full render setup too) (it also autosaves to this browser, so a reload restores it). Undo / Redo — or ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z — step through your edits.
- ⊕ Merge (appears when two or more forms are selected) collapses them into one captured solid — like merging layers. The parametric pieces become a single form you gumball, boolean, color, weigh and export like any other; the complexity collapses when a composition is locked in. Pick a quality (draft / std / fine), optionally keep the originals (hidden, not deleted), and the merged form saves and survives reload. Undo restores the originals in one step. (Imported and baked-grow captures now survive save/reload too.)
- ⏺ Rec records your whole build — every committed edit is captured into the saved .designo file, so sharing the file shares how the piece was made, not just how it looks (a student hands in a save; the instructor presses Play and watches the build). Press ⏺ to start (it glows), press again to stop. Whenever a recording is present, a replay bar appears: ▶ Play (replays from the empty stage at 1·2·4×), ⏭ End (jump to the final state), ⎙ Video (a time-lapse to a file), ✕ Clear (remove the recording — Save afterwards to make it permanent). The recording rides inside the file and adds little to its size; it isn't a separate export. (Recording is a desktop workflow; the ⏺ button hides on phones, but you can still watch a replay on any device.)
- ⤓ Import model… brings your own model in — OBJ · STL · glTF/GLB · Rhino 3DM (baked render meshes), the same formats as the render room — as a captured primitive: multi-part files fuse into one clay form (source materials stay in the render room). it's baked into a signed-distance field (the Detail slider sets the resolution — higher is crisper but slower to bake) and dropped into a fresh scene as one form you can fuse, subtract, gumball, shell, and export like any other. It's a frozen capture (movable/boolean-able, not re-shapeable); watertight meshes bake cleanest, and an imported model isn't saved into the .json — re-import after a reload.
- Demo is a guided autopilot — a tour that drives the real UI with a visible cursor through every tool and mode, leading with the radical-Italian distinguishers: the TROVATI found objects (scanned in Italy), the POMICE vesicular stone, LA GRATA's grille and its Duomo rose window, the grapevine and a Sottsass Totem, the Macchina Inutile, and a finish in real Italian marble in the Rendre room — then sketching and fusing primitives, each gumball handle, Add / Subtract / Intersect, color, the searchable shader library, Mirror (and its X/Y/Z fold axis), the panels drawer, Frame / Grid / Measure, Shell & opening a face into a cup (whole-body and per-part), Bend / Twist (whole-body and per-part), the outliner (rename, the keyable ◉ eyeball, right-click duplicate, typing a value exactly, Undo / Redo), the ◆ Keyframe animator (poses morph, a form added between keys grows in, an eyeballed-off form melts away), a gesture over every export and what its honest manifest carries, Gumbridge and the organic builders — a ⌱ Tendrile drooping between two forms then committed as ordinary clay, a ◈ Spine bead chain twisted into a cylinder cable, a ⌇ Braid of strands wound into a three-ply, a sphere wearing ✦ granules (sixty of them, varied, then banded), and ✧ filigree wire scrolled across a surface — then both at once on one form, beads between the scrolls (the pendant shot) — the Ring builder, its band then edited like ordinary clay (a bead intersected flush onto it, a carve subtracted) plus a set stone — the shoe-last builder (a parametric shoe last in real mm — size systems, styles, toe shapes, heel/spring — baked to clay, then a primitive fused onto it) — trees grown from seed across species (pear → aspen → fig) and posed by dragging their bones, a figure (joints carry human motion limits) whose wrist gets grabbed, a canine, a seahorse and an octopus, a dyad — a tree and an animal grown together side by side, a creature melted into the clay field, posed while melted, and baked back to clay, two forms collapsed into one captured solid with Merge, Terrain raised and dug, a word cast in MetaText then sized up and reframed (the camera follows scale changes), a short build captured and replayed by the session recorder, and (where WebGPU lives) the ◐ Rendre room: pick a part, dress it in one of the 20 procedural Italian marbles, swap the studio. Acts clean up after themselves; it flips Advanced tools on to show them and restores your settings when you press it again to stop. Export OBJ meshes the field (consistent outward normals, app units) for handoff to CAD/CAM; Export STL writes the mesh at real millimeters for 3D printing / casting, bundled in a .zip with an honest manifest — metal weight, material cost, the mm bounding box, and a watertight (closed-manifold) check. Export GLB writes a colored glTF (real mm) for web / AR / render handoff — it carries your per-form colors as vertex color, and bakes the weight, material and size into the file's glTF extras. Export 3MF writes the modern print interchange (real mm) with the same honest figures stored as native 3MF metadata inside the file.
- Preferences (the ⚙ by the wordmark): turn idle auto-rotate on/off and set its speed — the view drifts after a few seconds without input. Reference image (la velina) — load a photo to ghost over the stage and match a real object's proportions as you model; it's a tracing aid only (never weighed, exported, or saved). And the advanced 60-second reel toggle, which runs ▸ Demo fast and saves a fixed one-minute video that leads with what makes Designo Designo — the found objects, the stone, the rose window, the useless machine, and a marble-dressed render.
- Outliner (right edge) lists every form — click to select, double-click a name to rename it, and click the ◉ eye to hide a form (it's set aside — removed from the body but kept in the scene; click again to bring it back). ⌘-click (or Ctrl) adds/removes a form; Shift-click selects a range. With several selected, the gumball moves, turns and scales them all together (and Delete removes them all). Works on the canvas too. With exactly two forms selected, a ⌒ Connect… button appears — it opens a small dialog with four ways to join them. ⌒ Gumbridge orients a tunable strut between them so two separate forms connect into one fused body (then tune the strut's radius / smoothness like any form). ⌱ Tendrile is the organic cousin: one to eight tendril strands curve between the two forms and fuse into both — with Gravity on they droop on a real catenary (Tension 100 is a straight strut, 0 a full drool); with Gravity off a draggable ⌾ handle pulls the arc anywhere in space. Count adds strands scattered near the anchors, Character makes each wander its own way, Radius (in mm) and Taper shape the tube — all live until you ✓ commit, after which each strand is an ordinary form (gumball-movable, re-editable in the inspector, exportable). When strands pass close to each other they fuse into capillary webs on their own — that's the SDF model doing it, not a parameter. Third in the row, ◈ Spine places segment forms at regular intervals along the same path — spheres make a bead chain, cylinders with Twist make a twisted cable, boxes make vertebrae; Fuse on melts the segments into a continuous rhythm, off leaves a real chain with gaps (the segments are sized never to touch); the whole spine is ONE form afterward, fully re-editable. Fourth, ⌇ Braid sends two to six strands winding around the path — two strands make a twisted wire pair, three at Twist 1.5 a classic braid, five spread loose a woven tube; Interlace fuses the strands where they cross, and Spread 0 collapses them to a rope. One form, re-editable, in every export. With one form selected, a ✦ Decorate… button appears instead, opening a dialog with two surface treatments. ✦ Granule scatters tiny fused beads across that form's surface: Count (up to 200), Radius in real millimeters, size Variation, Coverage (all over, a top or bottom hemisphere, or an equatorial band), and a Blend that scales with the bead so they always read attached, never melted flat. The beads are packed like real work — never intersecting — and they are part of the form itself: they ride its moves, bend and twist with it, and count in the weight and every export. The technique is Etruscan granulation, the oldest trick in the goldsmith's book: thousands of tiny spheres fused to a surface without solder. Its sibling ✧ Filigree traces fine WIRE across the surface instead — strands that run, curl and scroll (Scroll dials wandering vs intentional spirals; Character adds hand wobble), constrained to the form by walking its own distance field, each skinned as wire of a real millimeter gauge and barely fused so it reads as applied, never embedded. Zones and edge behavior (reflect / terminate) shape where the tracery lives; the readout counts total wire length in mm — the goldsmith's consumption figure. Medieval wire tracery, procedurally; like the granules, the wirework is part of the form — it bends with it and counts in the weight and every export. Camera — drag empty space to tumble; scroll or pinch to zoom; Frame recenters the view on your design if it drifts off-screen. Measure shows the model's size in mm and lets you click two points on the surface for the distance between them — in real millimeters, the same scale as the Ring & Flatware builders. Turntable records a 360° spin of your design to a video (mp4 or webm) — set the duration and frame rate, optionally add a cinematic camera pan or eased (slow→fast→slow) motion; the panels stay out of the video. ◆ Keyframe is the animator (an Advanced tool — flip Animator on in Preferences › Advanced): each press captures the whole model (every form's position, rotation, size, shape, color and warps — never the camera). Capture two or more poses — the second key arms playback automatically (the Keyframes toggle in the Turntable box is the opt-out) — and the model morphs through your keys while the camera turns — ▶ Preview plays it live, ● Record saves the video. Forms can come and go between keys: add a form and capture again — on playback it swells into the body at that key (so ◆, add a shape, ◆, add a shape… replays how the thing was built); delete (or eyeball-hide) a form and it melts away. The animation also exports as an Alembic .abc — the Export ABC button opens its own options box (mesh samples + draft/std/fine quality): one animated mesh with a time sample per frame at 24 fps (real millimeters; the topology morphs freely) — any Alembic-aware renderer or animation package plays it directly on the timeline. Playback is non-destructive (your working pose comes back when the turn ends); keys last for the session.
Concordance — Designo ↔ Rhino · Blender · ZBrush
New to 3D, or arriving from a pro tool? Here's how Designo's verbs map to the big packages, so the skills carry both ways. (Search this list — type a tool name like “blender” or a verb like “shell”.)
- Blend × / Smoothness ≈ the smooth-union of an SDF · Blender metaball threshold, or a Boolean with “Smooth” · ZBrush DynaMesh blob fusion / ClayBuildup softness · Rhino has no live equivalent (it's edge fillets after the fact).
- Add · Subtract · Intersect ≈ boolean union · difference · intersection — Rhino BooleanUnion/Difference/Intersection · Blender the Boolean modifier · ZBrush Live Boolean. Designo's are smooth by default (set Blend low for crisp).
- Gumball ≈ Rhino Gumball · Blender the Move/Rotate/Scale gizmo (G/R/S) · ZBrush Gizmo 3D.
- Brush (inflate / deflate) ≈ ZBrush Inflate / Standard · Blender Sculpt mode Inflate / Draw · Rhino none (it isn't a sculpt tool).
- Shell ≈ Rhino Shell / OffsetSrf+cap · Blender the Solidify modifier · ZBrush Panel Loops / Shadowbox shell.
- Thicken (global outset) ≈ Rhino OffsetSrf (solid) · Blender Solidify / Displace · ZBrush Deformation › Inflate.
- Bend · Twist ≈ Rhino Bend / Twist (and Flow along curve) · Blender the Simple Deform modifier · ZBrush Deformation › Bend / Twist.
- Mirror ≈ Rhino Mirror · Blender the Mirror modifier · ZBrush Symmetry (X/Y/Z).
- Infill / Voronoi foam (graded lattice) ≈ Rhino Grasshopper + Intralattice · Blender Geometry Nodes / Voronoi · ZBrush none direct — and the pro lattice tools nTopology and Carbon/adidas-4D. Designo fills + grades it live.
- Wire (freeform tube through points) ≈ Rhino Pipe / Sweep1 along a curve · Blender a Curve with bevel + taper, or the Skin modifier · ZBrush ZSpheres / the Curve Tube brush. Designo's is one tapering SDF curve that fuses like clay.
- Antigranulator (dimple / bump / through-hole field) ≈ Rhino none direct (array + Boolean of holes) · Blender a dot texture driving Displace, or array+boolean · ZBrush Surface Noise / Insert-mesh dot spray. Designo scatters soft-edged perforation live, graded and bimodal.
- Pomice (vesicular-stone cavities) ≈ Rhino none direct · Blender a Voronoi/noise texture driving Displace + boolean · ZBrush Surface Noise / a cavity alpha. Designo bores a two-scale broken froth (travertine / tufo / pumice) live, weighed and exported as one solid.
- Section (the ⊘ slice) ≈ Rhino Section / clipping plane · Blender Bisect / the viewport clipping region · ZBrush Slice / Clip brushes (Designo's is view-only — it never cuts the model).
- Merge / Flatten (capture to one solid) ≈ Rhino Join + Mesh · Blender Join (Ctrl+J) / Apply Modifiers / Convert to Mesh · ZBrush Merge SubTools, then DynaMesh.
- Capture / Bake to clay (a grown body → editable solid) ≈ Blender Convert to Mesh · ZBrush DynaMesh / Remesh · Rhino Mesh.
- Grow (tree · figure · creature) ≈ Blender the Sapling add-on / Geometry Nodes · Houdini an L-system node · most tools have no built-in equivalent.
- Rendre (the render room) ≈ Blender Cycles / Eevee · Rhino Render / Cycles · KeyShot. Designo path-traces with HDRI lighting + PBR materials.
- Export STL / GLB / 3MF (real mm) ≈ every tool exports these — Designo adds an honest weight + watertight manifest. OBJ is app-unit, for general CAD.
- ◆ Keyframe / Turntable ≈ Blender the timeline + a turntable render · ZBrush Movie / Turntable · Rhino none built-in.
A short history of metaballs
The idea is older than most modeling tools. In 1982 Jim Blinn, visualizing molecules at JPL, described surfaces as a sum of soft density fields — his "blobby model." Where the fields overlapped, the surfaces bulged together. Touch two and they became one.
A few years later (1983–85) a group at Osaka University — Nishimura, Hirai, and colleagues — formalized the same notion for animation and named it metaballs (メタボール). In 1986 the Wyvill brothers and Craig McPheeters refined the field functions into "soft objects" with finite, well-behaved falloff.
The missing piece was turning a field back into a surface you could render or print. Marching Cubes (Lorensen & Cline, 1987) and Bloomenthal's implicit-surface polygonizers solved that — sample the field on a grid, find where it crosses zero, stitch triangles. Designo's OBJ export is a descendant of exactly this step (it uses marching tetrahedra, after Doi & Koide, 1991).
Through the 1990s metaballs became the look of liquid metal and mercury (the T-1000 lineage), a demoscene staple, and a stock feature of the big animation packages of the day. Digital sculpting tools later took the organic, topology-free spirit in their own direction.
The modern thread is signed distance fields (SDFs). Instead of summing densities you store distance-to-surface and combine shapes with a smooth minimum — popularized for real-time use by Inigo Quilez and the Shadertoy era, and raymarched directly on the GPU. SDF booleans give clean smooth unions and subtractions for free, which is why a whole new generation of clay-like, topology-free modelers is built on them. Designo sits squarely in that thread: every form is an SDF, fused with a smooth-min, raymarched live.
Credits & license
Made by Phil Renato and Claude (Anthropic), 2026 — part of ILCA. Non-commercial research software — your models and renders are yours (see LICENSE, DISCLAIMER & NOTICES alongside the app). Installable on iPad — Add to Home Screen for a fullscreen app that works offline.