glisten

metaball-first sketch modeling

sketch tool

Sketch with geometric abstractions, not curves or topology. Drop soft primitives into space, move them together and they fuse — osmotic union. For early, unstructured explorations.

▶ launch glisten

Runs in any modern browser with WebGL2 — no install, no account. Best on a laptop; there's a touch layout for phones. Click a primitive to drop it in, drag the gumball to pose it, dial the smoothness, export an OBJ.

glisten — a torus, cone and capsule fused into one glassy chrome body, mirroring a sky, on a black field

one fused body · SEATL chrome finish

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

five primitivesSphere, capsule, torus, cone, rounded box — 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…).
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.
four finishesGloss (wet clear-coat), Zebra (continuity stripes), Glass (translucent resin), and SEATL — true chrome mirroring a real Seattle-skyline sky.
export OBJWhen the form is right, the field is polygonised into a real mesh for handoff to CAD/CAM. A built-in demo drives the whole interface itself to show you how.

glisten interface — a glossy pink torus and capsule with the gumball handles active and the form inspector open on the right — the gumball + the form inspector · gloss finish

An early, provisional sketch tool. glisten descends from a long line of implicit-surface and metaball modeling — Blinn's blobs (1982), the Osaka metaballs, marching cubes, and the modern SDF lineage. The short history lives in the app's ? panel. Expect rough edges; it's released as research, not product.