ShapeShop B5 has been released. What’s new and exciting in this beta? Hold on to your pants:

• COLLADA and STL mesh export. And since ShapeShop models are always water-tight, you can 3D print your mesh at ShapeWays.I would use COLLADA for ShapeWays, I haven’t had much luck with STL…
• Hollow Operator. Hollowing a solid model means removing the interior so that it uses less material to 3D print (and hence is cheaper at ShapeWays). Basically hollowing converts a solid volume into a thin shell, so you might find it useful for other modeling tasks, too. The Hollow operator is not documented yet, but you’ll find it in the menu at Shapes > Operators > Hollow Operator, or in the right-click context menu in the tree.
• Bug Fixes. If your save files were loading models with weirdly-rotated parts, that bug should now be squashed. Also, the most recent NVidia driver seems to have introduced an OpenGL bug, but it was easy to work-around. And last but not least, for those of you with Intel GMA950 cards whose strokes were not showing up when you sketched, I think I have that licked.
• Mirror Operator. That’s right – the most requested feature in the ShapeShop forums is now implemented. And because ShapeShop is volumetric and procedural, you can arbitrarily mirror basically anything, including multiple-mirroring. Naturally, I have yet to document this feature in the manual, but I have created the tutorial video. I embedded it below, but you’ll have to head over to Vimeo to see the full-resolution version (make sure you go full-screen, so that you can read the text!).

And finally, a delightful scuplture created by ShapeShop user Andusan, with ShapeShop and Modo:

What are you waiting for? Go download ShapeShop B5!

Soooo…according to David Crow’s blog, I will be demo-ing ShapeShop at DemoCamp16. What is DemoCamp? I quote:

“DemoCamp is a variation of the un-conference style of event, started by the TorCamp group as an excuse to have more regular meetings where community members share what they’ve been working on, demo their products, meet others (and share a drink or 3).”

I will be showing the sketch-based modeling, decal texturing, and gestural interface aspects of ShapeShop, and if you’re lucky I’ll toss in previews of two top-secret unreleased ShapeShop features. Also, I’m going to (fingers crossed) release a new Beta on the weekend which fixes some rather nasty bugs I’ve fixed. Exciting times, ShapeShop fans (all 7 of you…)

So, if you’re in the Toronto area on the evening of Monday, December 3rd, why not come check out DemoCamp16 – free tickets are still available.

Some of my recent research has been on mimicking “design sketch” visual styles in a new ShapeShop renderer. This work will be presented at the Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering Symposium (also known as NPAR 2007) in August. After that, I’ll be staying for SIGGRAPH. If you are interested in the paper, you can grab a copy here – there are some pictures too. If you’d like to see the renderer in action, I’ve also put up a “tech demo” – a hacked-up version of ShapeShop v002 that uses this new renderer. You can grab that from the ‘Extras’ page. I would not advise saving any models you create with this version, though – the “.ssn” save format will not be supported by ShapeShop v003. You’ve been warned.

A preliminary pen-and-ink renderer is already available in ShapeShop v002, although it is a bit hidden – select “NPR Mode” from the View menu to enable it. The new renderer has been improved quite a bit – in particular, the pen-and-ink rendering is quite a bit faster. We’ve also added some new “visual scaffolding” features. Check it out (there is a larger version here):

ShapeShop v002 has been released – click here to download it. Unfortunately the current version only runs on hardware that supports SSE2, which basically means Intel P4 or newer (or, apparently, an AMD Opteron/Athlon64). So you might have to buy a new computer. But otherwise, ShapeShop v002 is completely free.

ShapeShop is a sketch-based 3D modeling tool for creating procedural hierarchical implicit volume models, also known as “BlobTrees”. At least, that’s the technical description. The short version is that ShapeShop is a fun tool for quickly sketching 3D models, which just happens to have some very powerful features that aren’t available in any of the state-of-the-art commercial 3D modeling systems. If you’re familiar with Metaballs, then you might have some sense of what ShapeShop’s BlobTrees can do. But BlobTrees go way beyond what is possible with Metaballs. If Metaballs are gin-and-tonic, BlobTrees are red bull spiked with crack. In fact, ShapeShop only scratches the surface of what is possible with BlobTrees – there is much more to come.

Unfortunately, that means you can’t load ShapeShop models into any other programs (yet). However, ShapeShop does export nice triangle meshes in .OBJ format (make sure you use the QuickRefine button first ! )

ShapeShop also has a novel decal texturing system. Of course, right now you can’t actually export the composited texture map (although you can export each decal OBJ individually, and you could technically load them all into some other program for rendering. It just might take a while). Texture export is coming soon, as are lots of other features (some high-priority things on the list include speeding up the interactive remeshing and making it possible to import existing meshes).

To get a feel for how fast and easy it is too use ShapeShop, check out the video below. Then go give it a try!