Description
I tried Clavicula for a bit and ended up making this crate model.
Clavicula is a bit complex than Plasticity (now commercial) and MagicaCSG (now Patreon-only), I'll tell you that, but I guess I can try using it a bit more. Nevertheless, I tried modeling this simple crate design using SDF primitives in Clavicula (which is why I picked it up). This crate design was inspired by Pixelmine's plushie crate design for Pixelmon/Cobblemon . I know it's not all that much, but this was simply me testing out the software and messing around in it--pushing its limits to find what it can and can't do, not to make something incredibly dope on day 1 of using the software.
Even though good software exists, no good software will exist without any bugs and problems--or some devs may call "intentional features"--because making software will involve errors and fixing those errors will involve even more errors. That said, I have some gripes about Clavicula:
Selecting things is pretty finicky, especially when trying to select a negative primitive where you can only select it by hovering over a positive primitive. There wasn't an outliner/hierarchy for all the objects in the 3D viewport, which I think is needed in cases like this where you need to select something specific that's--for example--hidden behind every other object. Blender and MagicaCSG both have some kind of outliner or object hierarchy.Grid snapping isn't consistent whatsoever and there's no way to set the resolution. The grid resolution changes per zoom level and that messes up trying to align things properly.Speaking of aligning, the align tool doesn't work the same as how I thought it would, which would allow you to align the position of the first object you clicked on to another object on any axis. Here, it seems to just rotate the object.Speaking of grids, a horizontal XZ (or, in certain software like this one, XY where Y is used in the place of Z for up and down) grid floor would be nice.Mirroring/using symmetry on an SDF primitive causes an indefinite hang (before anyone says, I don't think this is an SDF issue as I've used mirrors in MagicaCSG and it never hanged or crashed whenever I mirror or symmetrize a primitive).After finding out how to export objects as meshes, which is to right-click on an object and click "Instant Meshes (either automatic or manual)" in the , I also found out that ONLY objects can be exported to meshes. If you want to export an SDF as a mesh, you have to voxelize it first. HOWEVER:
You need external software, specifically something called Instant Meshes, to do this (yes, Clavicula doesn't have an internal.Remeshing an SDF automatically can cause artifacts (like missing faces and lower-poly meshes) as you're essentially remeshing an SDF the second time after you've remeshed it once using voxelization.
To tackle this, you could use manual remeshing which opens Instant Meshes, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it wouldn't work (no object would load in, even if I'm opening the mesh file Clavicula created). And this isn't an issue with my GPU either like MagicaCSG has when using an Intel GPU (nothing would render in the viewport for Intel GPU's, so you would have to force MagicaCSG to use your other non-Intel GPU). It's just that nothing's loading whatsoever.Given all of this, Clavicula definitely needs its own internal object-to-mesh exporter like Plasticity, Blender, and MagicaCSG all do instead of having to use external software from this (if there's a reason for this otherwise, then I apologize). In no way am I sponsored by, affiliated or partnered with Clavicula or the dev(s) of the software and I'm not getting paid to say anything about it; so I can say just about anything I want about it, however, I do hope these gripes can be taken in mind!