Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Oct 5, 2021

  TL;DR: The best polygon-based VR sculpting software out there. Having tried it, I would have easily paid double. 10/10, can't wait to see what the next updates bring. -------- I'm normally too lazy to write reviews, but I overcame that for SL. If you are a 3D artist, or an aspiring one like me, do NOT ignore this tool. I've tried pretty much everything that is out there in terms of VR creation tools; Adobe Medium, Gravity Sketch, Quill, OpenBrush, Kodon, and of course, ShapeLab. Currently I make use of a mix of Gravity Sketch, Medium, and now ShapeLab, on a daily basis. As a guy who is most comfortable in Blender, ShapeLab feels very familiar to me, almost like a subset of Blender's sculpting features, but in VR form, which is just unbeatable for letting your creativity run wild. The dynamic retopo that it does automatically for you is really great, as well as the regularize, decimate, and smooth functions that can be applied to the whole mesh. The ability to use one of the many provided materials is great for visualizing the final outcome. The newly added alpha support is a lot of fun; again, similar to using alphas in Blender. In terms of performance, I haven't seen any stability issues and my computer hasn't caught fire even when working with a high resolution mesh. I've pushed it quite high and had no issues, 500k - 1 million polys. I can't say the same for Medium, where as soon as I get into the higher voxel numbers, I start to feel like I'm watching a stop-motion movie. I'm running a Ryzen 3300X 4.2 GHz paired with an Nvidia 1650 Super, and it's been smooth as butter. I did have a crash when trying to import a multi-million + poly model made in Medium, but that is probably just asking too much, and I should have decimated when I exported from Medium. Speaking of Medium, obviously, its voxel modelling offers some advantages that polygon sculpting can't provide, namely the ability to disconnected material anywhere, and on the same layer. You can achieve something kind of similar now using ShapeLab's multiple objects and boolean operations. The boolean operations are still in the early stages. They've been working well for me so far. The brushes are all very sensible and useful. The trim brush has actually been better for me for flattening than the actual flatten brush, but both have their place. A note on the trim brush: don't neglect the "lock plane" option in the trim brush settings, it's very useful for hard surface type sculpts. I found that I can use the flatten brush to create a flat spot, and then using the trim brush with the "Dynamic" and "lock plane" settings enabled, I can extend that flat spot and create a perfect surface. Great for mechanical stuff or sharply angled planes. Even just with this tool combo, I've found ShapeLab so much easier to use for hard surface sculpting than Medium, since Medium really wasn't designed in the proper way for that. The masking is insanely useful and powerful, and is one of the things sorely lacking from Medium that is really a core feature of any sculpting tool. The ability to mirror on 1, 2, or 3 axes at the same time is really key and it's something missing from other software I've tried. Really appreciate that. The UI/UX is great in my opinion. I especially like the ease of using the left thumb stick to quickly switch between brush mode and object/layout mode. The undo/redo placed on the left/right stick axis makes it really easy to undo your mistakes, a feature I use probably 20 times per minute. The object mode tools are efficient to get to, and in particular the clone tool is so quick and user-friendly. The clone tool would be the perfect partner of the boolean operations, if only we could apply booleans to more than 2 objects at a time. I made a note about that below. --------- Some minor gripes and wants that I hope will be rectified in an update down the road: - The documentation and tutorials that are available are pretty skimpy, I'd like to have more of those to help me better take advantage of everything ShapeLab can do. But I think I read that the devs are working on that. The ShapeLab Youtube channel has a few nice videos where you can watch some pros work with the program, but they aren't voice narrated and are quite sped up so I found myself pausing a lot to zoom in and squint to find out what tool/setting they were using to achieve some effect. - I've noticed that the pinch/crease brush tool doesn't remember my setting for "To Point" or "To Line" when I change to a different tool and then come back. This is annoying because it also happens when I use the alt trigger to quickly smooth something out, and then I have to always remember to switch it back. - I wish I could select more than 2 objects for boolean operations. Ex. if I put down a bunch of primitives, it would be nice to be able to select them all and run a Union on them all at once, to make some quick base meshes to work from. This might be computationally really heavy, not sure, but it would be a nice-to-have. - Would be nice to be able to detach a specific menu box from the controller. Ex. in Gravity Sketch, when I know I will need to change settings around often, I can grab and drag out the brush settings panel and leave it floating off to the side so I can quickly change things. - Scrolling between tools by pressing left and right on the right thumb stick seems a bit misplaced to me. I think I've seen that in other programs, the up/down on the right stick controls brush size, as in SL, and left/right controls the falloff/inner radius of the brush. Or you might consider letting us switch back to the previous brush with left/right. My problem is that I can't remember the order of the brushes in the tool panel, and so I always end up switching to the wrong brush, haha. But it's a minor issue. - Down the road, the ability to define different face sets for masking would be really handy (it's something I use in Blender a lot). Again, a minor nice-to-have. - Some additional options for painting colors would be nice, like different color modes e.g. darken, multiply, dodge, screen, etc, would be nice. ---------- Over all, a really amazing tool that is currently unmatched in the VR world. I could really only see a couple of competitors down the road: Substance Modeler (Adobe's remake of Medium, currently in private beta), and possibly Kodon, which has amazing marketing videos, and which I also recently bought, but it's a constant crashfest and half the functions don't work yet. Thanks for your hard work, devs, you deserve more recognition for this software, hopefully as VR design becomes more and more mainstream, you'll all become millionaires and retire to private islands.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2021

  ShapeLab comapre to other VR sculpting tool like Medium or Kodon. From the marketing seem to be the worst but after real use experience ShapeLab do not have any fancy thing but turn out to be the best in usability. Medium is lack of surface sculpting tool which is hard to make an exact shape for detailing. Kodon is too unstable for real project. ShapeLab live inbetween - the surface sculpting is good so you can make any shape do you want but of course not as creative as Medium voxel but it just work and have most stand tools for digital sculpting. - performance is best of 3 and very stable. the tesselation tech in ShapeLab have better performance then ZBrush Sculptris Pro or Blender Dyntopo it can tesselate on object of 12 mil pocount very fast which is surprise.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 30, 2021

  I strongly recommend the 3D modeling VR program Shapelab. It´s the most intuitive way to do sculpting digitally I have come across. It´s also not very demanding on your computer. If you think Blender Zbrush and Maya ar shitboring programs and you have no interest in these softwares because of the tons of menues and stuff you need to be able to sculpt and you just want to start creatings like you use a pen on a paper and have a background as an artist then this is the ultimate program. I didn´t write this because I got paid for it, I wrote this review just because I really want more true artists find out that you dont need to learn the stiff programs (That is actually more created for programmers than artists it feels like). So if you own one of the following headsets: Oculus Quest 2,Valve Index,,HTC Vive,Oculus Rift,Windows Mixed Reality there will be no end of how fun you can have with actually feel the true sense of enjoyment to just start sculpting your 3dmodels directly. It´s a must if you like trying new art materials from time to time. And if you hesitate, let me put it like this: What the fudge did your phone cost? some 100+ euro probably and if it did then you own it to your creative side to invest these 20euro for you feeling the raw sense of pure superfunfun :D Seen from an artists background like me it feels Blender and Zbrush and most softwares are not actually made for artists and is totally bogged down in the old fashioned tools named "mouse" and "keyboard" and we are stuck in the 1980 with these outdated items which does not belong in a new digital era. I often thought why you cant you be able to use two "mouses" at the same time when you want to make 3dmodels or when playing games or why not even a gamepad for sculpting which would have been more intuitive. Zbrush and Blender is proven to be very good programs as we all know but they are "programs" and feel programmed and not user friendly at all and you need to sit with assboring manuals and watch so many tutorial videos and even when you done that and learnt the basic it really has nothing to do with how you sculpt with a slab of clay in real life and have you can use two hands to cut off or add layers of clay to it. No more is this any true since now you have Shapelab on steam for 14 euro, on sale now or their regular price for 20euro which is the best invested money I ever done in any software ever (except publisher which I use for editing my magazine). If you just do a search on Shapelab you can watch lots of videos of how it work and also checkout steam and read reviews by others and you understand that this is something you must try or just go own right now and die :D Background: I bought my Oculus Quest 2 solely for sculpting and 3Dmodelling but after a while the free program Adobe Medium which is similar to this suddenly changed their minimum requirements to use it and I was overnight without the possibility to do what I started to enjoy so much namely make my twisted creatures in 3D. So my sort of review is more like a boost of how much I can recommend it and really not about the program in detail of how to use it because it´s that easy to learn so its not really much to tell more than you use your controllers much as you use your hands when sculpting in IRL. The manual is only 12 pages and not heavy on the text and very easy to get how it works. So I say BRING CREATIVITY INTO 3D MODELING!
• gamedeal user

  Jan 12, 2022

  Outstanding software. A viable, and dare I say more functional alternative to Adobe Medium. More complete than Kodon and a lovely fusion of Blender and ZBrush. It is great for surface modelling, using polys instead of voxels. Lovely array of tools. Some QoL improvements are all that need to be made.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 23, 2022

  ShapeLab fills, in my opinion, an incredibly undervalued medium for 3D sculpting. The level of intuitive control and object depth perception provides serious benefit for creating 3D objects, especially for 3D printing. It's a very intuitive and powerful software for what it is, but there were a few issues that impacted my workflow. For one, I was not able to find a way to translate objects via exact coordinates or degrees of rotation, nor did there appear to be a way to move an object to scene origin. Additionally, there does not appear to be a way to rotate or translate an object on a single axis. The only way appears to be to grip an object with the controller and manually adjust, which can be imprecise to say the least. Information/documentation online seems sparse. I was able to find an official website, but it seemed to just provide surface level information on the features available, rather than providing anything deeper. Aside from a dedicated knowledge-base or wiki, I feel like some sort of Reddit or Discord community would be an immense benefit since I find myself fruitlessly searching online for information that seems to not be available. This could also open up more clear discussion/communication between the developers and end users, which can be a boon for developing in a direction that benefits users and the community in general. The only avenue I've found thus far is email, which I find less than ideal since it lacks the open discussion such as the methods above. Lastly, it doesn't seem like there's any sort of public roadmap for where the development of this software is planned to go - anything that is available is unfortunately a bit outdated. For example, in the Early Access panel on this store page, the "First Final Release" is slated for "late 2021". This doesn't exactly give the confidence I need to seriously implement this software into my workflow, especially as other options become more available. That being said, for the current price tag of $19.99, I would definitely say the value of this software is much higher than the current cost. I believe it has some serious potential, and while the developer updates on Steam are certainly appreciated, I would like to see some more clear communication from the developers to build enough confidence to use this software in my workflow. Community support for software can be incredibly useful in building wider adoption, and I think it would be a boon to ShapeLab's success.
• hercules.art

  Jul 11, 2022

  Hi, I started use your VR application "ShapeLab", this is very interesting experience in VR sculpting, but I find first uncomfortable function for me I can't invert sculpting brush by hot key only can use button in the menu this is very uncomfortable variation for quick sculpting and same problems with mask and changing brush sharpness, only for smooth brush and changing brush size we have hot keys button and this is a good decision, can you do some think with this problems, some buttons duplicate functions on both hands, like move objects maybe you can changed these functions for hot keys and comfortable quick sculpting. Thanks
• shawn_brynelson

  Jul 12, 2022

  I've never done any 3d modeling in my life, but I picked this up on a whim when I got my first VR headset. I've come to realize that I have an artistic side to myself that ive never known before. The level of intuitiveness this software has, and how natural it feels to sculpt in VR is something else. There are certainly some features I wish it had, but over all its a very polished product that is a joy to use. Some options I would like to see in the future would be more painting options, as well as different materials (coloured glass would be my #1 request) as well as the option to upload your own materials.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 11, 2022

  A truly fantastic program for sculpting and resculpting models! One of the most intuitive out there and as powerful as could be desired. Highly reccomended.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2022

  i highly reccomend, the ease with which you can manipulate the "clay" is so much more intuitive than blender, for me at least, that's the only other program i had experience with, added bonus is that you'll see the thing in front of you, if you want to print it, so you can roughly get a look at how it'll be when finished as for negatives, not really that heavy, one small thing is, if you're doing a sculpt for a flat render, you can't really look up a single point camera of any sorts, a simple camera tool would be great for that, something that would just stick with the model, or the world and had a small display.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 1, 2023

  First time using it, having watched no tutorials I was able to create a good model. Very easy use. I look forward to seeing how this evolves. It's very fun to create in this program.