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!

When I released ShapeShop B1, I said I was going to try to keep posting monthly beta updates. Clearly, that didn’t happen. But, at long last, ShapeShop B3 is available.

This one took a while because you’re getting a major new feature - I’ve completely re-designed the 3D manipulation widgets and interface. The new system is based on gestures, which can be combined to do 3D rotation / translation / scaling (yes, scaling, at long last!), easy access to world/object coordinate systems, transformation around arbitrary pivots points (with their own frames), snapping, etc - the list goes on. To demonstrate, here is a YouTube video:

Pretty neat, huh? Well, I hope you like it, anyway. If you do like it, or even if you don’t like it, and especially if you completely love it or absolutely hate it (no! never!), please let me know your thoughts at feedback@shapeshop3d.com. If you’re interested in the “science” behind it, you can check out the paper that I will be presenting at Eurographics 2008 in Crete.

Other new stuff in B3:

• As mentioned, support for scaling. Note that scaling is limited to object-space axes of individual primitives
• Flip (again, only object axes for now)
• Bug fixes, including a major bug with file loading that
• Visual & UI enhancements

So, what are you waiting for? Head over the download area!

OK, as promised, ShapeShop B2 is available on the download page, just in time for DemoCamp16. There aren’t any major new features in this one, I just found (and fixed) some pretty major problems in the file loader. If you have saved models that weren’t loading properly before, they might load now. (And if you have saved models that used to load and don’t, well, drop me a line).

There is one change that you might notice. It seems like one of the hardest things for new ShapeShop users to understand is that if they make a stroke they don’t want to use, they have to clear it, otherwise the system is going to try to add it to the next stroke they draw. Essentially, once a stroke is drawn, the system goes into “drawing mode” until all the strokes are cleared. To try and get this message across, I’ve added some feedback - the 3D view is tinted red whenever there are any existing strokes. I tried to make the effect as subtle as possible, while also making it impossible for a new user to miss. I’ve had it turned on for a month or so, and barely notice it anymore, so….you’ll get used to it =).

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.

Ok, so the installer I released last week did not include the “merge modules” for the Microsoft C runtime libraries (CRT) and MFC. Normally these should already exist on your system, but since I’ve switched to Visual Studio 2005, which uses version 8.0 of the CRT, which didn’t exist when XP shipped, I have to include them. And now I have.

So, if you tried B1 last week and it wouldn’t run, please try again. And if you still get an error message, please post it in the forum so I can try to debug it. Thanks!

Ok, ShapeShop B1 (the first beta of version 003) is available on the download page. I am planning on doing beta releases on a monthly-ish cycle, although if some critical bugs pop up (and I fix them) I will publish a new version ASAP. This first beta has not been heavily tested (surprise! it’s a beta…), but it is based on the code I have been using for the last year. So hopefully nothing bad will happen for you. Any existing save files should load without problems, if they don’t, drop me an e-mail (and the zipped-up save file, if you can).

Ok, now for the good and bad news.

Good News (aka new and improved stuff):

• Support for AMD Athlon processors, and installer now works in Vista (I hope!)
• Massively improved view/camera controls (described in this post)
• More shape parameters exposed as UI widgets
• (most) UI widgets now give user some feedback
• Simplified mesh refinement tools, including adaptive subdivision (see the manual)
• Updated manual, now included in installer (this is a work-in-progress, so not everything is updated yet…)
• Simplified menus and toolbars (aka I got rid of all the research cruft)
• Delete-Everything menu item (File Menu->New Scene)
• Initial image plane support (Shapes Menu->Add Billboard. Currently cannot be saved…coming soon!)
• Titlebar actually says “ShapeShop” now…

Bad News (aka old stuff that is currently broken):

• Decal texturing
• NPR rendering
• “Surface Tubes” (if you used this, let me know and I can add it back. I just think it didn’t work very well…)

That’s it for now. You might notice that there aren’t many significant new features listed up there. That will change. There are some major new features in development, but they aren’t quite ready to be released yet. I’m going to hold back on new features until I feel like they are stable enough. In the meantime, you benefit from the UI and stability improvements.

Now head over to the download page and try it out!

…that is the question.

Seriously. I’m trying to guage how much interest there would be in a ShapeShop 003 beta version. Because there are some caveats. 003 has some near-complete-rewrites of some of the major subsystems. Sketching and modeling should still work the same as before (actually, better). But textures will be more-or-less broken. Meaning they won’t save. At all. But, since you can’t export textures anyway (yet), I kind of suspect that this won’t have a huge impact on anyone.

On the other hand, if I do release a Beta, there will probably be more than one, because I’ll also do bug fixes (if you report them, and I find the time). And new features will be released as they are finished (and/or published). And it will work on AMD machines. And Vista.

So, to make this decision, I need some feedback. In particular, I need to know what parts of ShapeShop you guys are using. Please, be specific. Do you use surfaces of revolution? Do you refine and export meshes? I need to know. I need to know how many people will actually be able to use what is currently working. Either in the comments to this post, or in the forum. So, please, give me the “411″, as the kids say….

A few weeks ago I promised a version of ShapeShop that would run on AMD processors. I haven’t forgotten. But I have discovered something….distressing. I seem to have…misplaced…the source code for ShapeShop v002.

I really thought I had a backup “checkpoint” (aka zip file) of the v002 source, but it turns out that the closest checkpoint I have is the code I used for my SIGGRAPH 06 paper. The release version wasn’t done for a few more months. Now, I’m not completely clueless - I do use source control, so in theory I should be able to pull the exact release codebase from CVS.  Except that I switched from CVS to SVN last summer when I changed universities, at which point I deleted the CVS repository. I do have a backup of the CVS repository, so I might be able to get the code, but it’s not going to be as easy as just re-compiling.

I could do an AMD release of the older code - it has all the interface features that people seem to actually use. It looks like the main thing missing is the XML save-file format. I initially had a binary format, but I realized that was going to be a nightmare for maintaining backwards-compatibility*. This binary format does load in v002, but it probably won’t in v003. Which I can imagine will be pretty frustrating for any users who download it…

Any suggestions?

* You would not believe how much extra work is necessary to release research software, if you want to make it actually usable. This is why you hardly ever see those cool SIGGRAPH demos released into the wild…

So, I haven’t upgraded to Windows Vista yet, but it seems that the ShapeShop installer doesn’t work on Vista. Also, ShapeShop has never worked on AMD processors. Well, good news - about a month ago a friend of mine “donated” an Athlon machine to me, so I now have a build of ShapeShop v002 with 3DNow! support. Meaning it will run on an Athlon. I am going to put that up next week after SIGGRAPH. I’m also going to try to find a way to get a Vista version going - it may end up just being a .zip file, but it should work until v003 comes out.

(Actually, if you have a friend or access to a non-Vista machine, you could try just copying the C:\Program Files\UnknownWare\ShapeShop 002\ folder to your Vista machine. If you do that, and it works, please let me know!)

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):