glisten is a metaball-first sketch modeler. You don't build topology — you drop soft primitives into space and let them fuse, like clay. 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). It drops into the scene.
• 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.
• Inspector (right): switch Add / Subtract, set this form's Smoothness, and tune its shape (a torus's radius & thickness, a cone's tip, a box's roundness…). Remove it from here.
• Blend × (bottom) multiplies every form's smoothness at once — 1 = each at its own setting, >1 = molten, 0 = crisp.
• Shade (bottom-left): Gloss (wet clear-coat), Zebra (continuity stripes for reading surface fairness), Glass (translucent resin), SEATL (chrome — mirrors a real Seattle / Space Needle sky).
• Demo drives the controls itself to build a form; Rec records that to a QuickTime-ready movie (record with UI keeps the panels & cursor in shot). Export OBJ meshes the field for handoff to CAD/CAM.
• Camera — drag empty space to tumble; scroll or pinch to zoom.

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. glisten's OBJ export is a descendant of exactly this step (it uses marching tetrahedra).

Through the 1990s metaballs became the look of liquid metal and mercury (the T-1000 lineage), a demoscene staple, and a feature in Blender, 3ds Max (Blobmesh) and Maya. ZBrush later took the organic, topology-free spirit in its own direction with DynaMesh and sculpting.

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 new generation of clay-like, topology-free modelers — MagicaCSG, Womp, Adobe's Substance Modeler, Clayxels — are built on them. glisten sits squarely in that thread: every form is an SDF, fused with a smooth-min, raymarched live.

Credits

Made by Phil Renato and Claude (Anthropic), 2026 — part of ILCA.

SEATL chrome environment: Space Needle 360° Panorama, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA). Built with three.js. A provisional, early-stage sketch tool — expect rough edges.