…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):

In preparation for the release of ShapeShop v003 sometime in the near future, ShapeShop has moved to a new home – ShapeShop3D.com! Besides being easier to remember, the new website has forums! That’s right – your suggestions, bug reports, and vicious flames can now be posted on “the internets”, for all to see! The new site also has several informative new pages, a variety of download buttons (with drop-shadows!), and a development blog (which you’re reading right now!). At some unspecified point in the future, there will also be a gallery of user-submitted artwork, and technical explanations of ShapeShop features. (Don’t hold your breath, though…SIGGRAPH season starts in October…)

Welcome to ShapeShop3D.com, your new favorite website.

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!