glisten

Every form in glisten is a signed distance function, raymarched together on a single quad and combined with a smooth minimum. There's no mesh while you work — just fields melting into one another. Add fuses two forms into one; Subtract carves. A per-form slider says how molten each joint reads; a global Blend × multiplies them all at once.

what's in the room

• seven primitivesSphere, capsule, torus, cone, rounded box, cylinder, and a polygon prism (n-gon, star, or tapered pyramid) — chosen by surveying real objects. In combination they reach most of them. Each carries its own shape dials (a torus's radius & thickness, a cone's tip…). Add, subtract, intersect — or leave a form inert (present but doing nothing, optionally as a faint reference ghost you model against) — or import your own model — OBJ, STL, glTF/GLB, or Rhino 3DM (the same formats the render room takes) — baked into a captured primitive (at a resolution you choose) that you build on like the rest.
• one gumballMove, turn, and size all live at once on a single handle — arrows, rings, and cubes together. No mode switching, no keyboard shortcuts. Click a form; the gumball appears. Or switch to the brush and push or pull any surface like clay — inflate and deflate by hand, still all metaball, and it weighs and exports right along with everything else.
• a shader libraryA searchable list of finishes — Gloss, Glass, true Chrome (mirroring a real Seattle-skyline sky), Gold, Pearl, Toon, Zebra continuity stripes, a hidden-line plot, and more. Type to filter. Each form takes its own color.
• buildersOne menu of parametric generators that compose the primitives into finished pieces — a ring at a real US size (with an optional faceted stone in a prong or bezel setting), or a shoe last at a real shoe size (EU/US/UK/CM, ten styles, toe shapes, heel and toe spring — baked to clay you can hollow into an upper). Each gives a live weight and material cost across real metals — gold to titanium to pewter for flatware, the precious set for rings — then hands you the clay to keep sculpting. Bend and Twist warp any body along its length; an Edge toggle rounds (fillet) or bevels (chamfer) every join. An Infill builder fills a body's interior with a space-filling lattice — gyroid, Schwarz-P, diamond, Neovius, an octet truss, organic Voronoi struts or foam, a sheared 4D strut lattice, or a smooth isotropic spinodal — and can grade its density across the model the way an Adidas 4D midsole is tuned: dense and stiff at one end, open and soft at the other. Hollow the core into a surface cage, or wrap the whole body in a Voronoi cell-edge shell. It lightens the piece the way you would in Grasshopper or nTopology, and weighs and exports as one lattice solid.
• organic buildersSelect two forms and four bridges appear: Gumbridge orients a straight tunable strut; Tendrile sends up to eight organic strands drooping between them on a real catenary — or arcing from a draggable handle — each fusing into both bodies and staying re-editable after commit; Spine places segment forms along the same path (spheres make a bead chain, cylinders with twist a cable, boxes vertebrae — fused into a rhythm, or left a true gapped chain); Braid winds strands around the path into twisted pairs, three-ply braids, and loose woven tubes. Select one form instead and the surface tools appear: Granule scatters up to four hundred tiny fused beads — Etruscan granulation, packed never to intersect and sized in real millimeters, laid in an even golden-angle field or in flowing streams that walk the surface, with a vacancy dial for the empty-cell look; Filigree traces fine wire across the surface in running scrolls and vines, held to the form by its own distance field, total wire length counted in millimeters. All of it is part of the form — bending with it, weighing in, traveling in every export.
• mirror, measure & morphMirror for symmetry across a chosen X/Y/Z fold, measure any distance in real millimeters, and frame or auto-spin the view — including a one-click Turntable that records a 360° video. A minimal keyframe animator rides on it: capture the whole model in two or more poses and it morphs through them as the camera turns — add forms between keys and they swell into the body on playback, so capture-add-capture replays how the thing was built. The animation also exports as an Alembic .abc — one animated mesh, a time sample per frame at 24 fps, real millimeters — that any Alembic-aware renderer or animation package plays directly on the timeline.
• growA generative builder: a stochastic L-system grows a tree in three species — a rounded pear, a tall columnar aspen, a low broad fig — never the same twice. Or a Vitruvian figure, its joints carrying human motion limits so a limb can't bend past a real range. Or a creature — a canine, a seahorse, or an octopus. Each is a skeleton fused into one smooth poseable skin, with printable proportions. Tick Dyad and a tree and an animal grow together, side by side, as one body. Drag the joint dots; flip to wire to see the bones; melt the body into the clay, or bake it solid. A tree can also be directed: pick any form as a target and the branches grow toward it, planting small contact nodes where they take hold — roots reaching for ground, claws closing on a stone.
• a rendering roomOne button (◐ Rendre) opens a real path tracer: a seamless infinity cove (no horizon line, from any camera), 33 HDRI environments (drag your own in), 577 PBR materials to drop onto parts, right-click PBR editing, glass with true refraction, AgX color — and PNG renders up to 4K, all in the same tab. Every studio in the library is original work made for glisten or CC0 (Poly Haven), logged per file in the app's NOTICES.
• moving picturesKeyframe the camera, the lighting, materials, and the model itself on one timeline (▦ Film) and render it as a resumable PNG frame sequence — or pick a camera move from a palette of shots (orbits, specular sweeps that crawl a highlight across the surface, a dolly-zoom) that scale themselves to whatever you've built, scrub it live, and bake it onto the film. A word typed in clay (MetaText) can condense out of a molten mass and melt away again; seeded terrain raises an island of earth you can dig into — and keyframe closed over what you bury.
• yours to keepUndo freely and save the whole sketch as a re-editable file — it autosaves to your browser too. When the form is right, export it for CAD/CAM or printing: OBJ, or — at real millimeters — STL, colored glTF and FBX (for Blender · Maya · Unity), and 3MF, each bundled with an honest manifest of weight, material cost, size, and a watertight check. And a Rendre scene hands off whole: ⬆ To Rhino / Blender writes a GLB with named parts at true scale, materials in Cycles' own PBR vocabulary, the camera, and the lighting setup as a cited reference with its license attached — the dialog says exactly what travels, and the caveats ride inside the file.
• it demos itselfPress ▸ Demo and a visible cursor drives the real interface through a guided tour of nearly everything above — sculpting, booleans, the builders (then carving into what they built), posing a grown tree by its bones, melting a creature into the clay, even the rendering room — cleaning up after itself act by act. Watching it is the fastest way to learn the tool.

six more corners of the room

Infill doesn't just hollow a part, it re-grows the inside as one continuous lattice — gyroid, Schwarz-P, an octet truss, a sheared 4D-style strut weave, or this one, Voronoi foam, rounded cell-edge pipes with real open windows. Grade it: dense and stiff at one end, open and soft at the other, the same trick a printed midsole uses. Set cell size and wall thickness in real millimeters and it fuses, weighs and exports as one lattice solid — the viewport shows exactly what prints.

Select two forms and Braid winds strands around the path between them — two strands make a twisted wire pair, three at the right twist a classic braid, five or six spread loose into a woven tube. Interlace fuses the strands where they cross, so it reads as one rhythm instead of parts, or drop Spread to zero and collapse it to a rope. It sags on a real catenary if you leave gravity on. Commit it and it's ordinary clay from there — gumball, color, re-edit, export.

Filigree traces fine wire across a form's own surface — not a decal, it walks the actual distance field, so it bends and wraps wherever the body curves. Dial Scroll from wandering toward tight intentional spirals, set the wire gauge in real millimeters, and the readout counts total wire length, the same number a goldsmith would want. It rides the form permanently: bends with it, shows up in Rendre, and counts in the weight and every export.

Grow doesn't sculpt an octopus, it grows one, from a seed, through a skeleton of tapered bones fused into one smooth skin — the same machinery as the tree and the figure, aimed at eight curling arms instead of branches. Drag any joint dot and the skin follows live; reroll and it's a different animal every time. Pose it, key it, and it morphs on the turntable, or melt it straight into the clay and boolean against it like anything else.

Press ◆ Keyframe, change the model — move it, resize it, add a form, delete one — press ◆ again, and the Turntable becomes the playhead: camera spins while the whole model morphs through your poses. A form added between keys doesn't just appear, it swells into the body; one removed melts away. It isn't a separate animation tool bolted on — it's the same clay you were already sculpting, just given a timeline.

Every material lives in a searchable library, hundreds deep, real names not swatches — type “gold” and every gold reads back, type “pearl” and it finds that too. Right-click any part and Edit material opens the real PBR sliders underneath: metal, roughness, glass, IOR, clearcoat, sheen, glow, plus a decal slot and a paint tool. Edit one and it forks a session copy, so the library itself never gets scuffed up — undo and the part goes back to wearing the original, untouched.

Designo, in a few pictures

Same engine as glisten, a different dialect on top — five things that only exist in the Italian room.

The sliders wear chrome: every dial turns like a real cross-handled tap, ratchet click at each notch. The drawer leads with things, not shapes — a Fiat, a payphone, a lion's-mouth letterbox, scanned in Italy and dropped into the same clay as everything else. Grata's Rosa mode turns a thin disc into a rose window, radial spokes and rings computed rather than carved. Cassettone bosses a blob into a Renaissance coffered door. And the render room keeps a shelf of twenty procedural Italian marbles — Carrara, Calacatta, Verde Alpi, the porphyries — computed from where a point sits in space, so there's no seam no matter how you cut the part. Same clay underneath, a different dialect on top.