Volumetric modeling

Modeling in Arkio is inspired by working with physical objects and using your hands. Geometric shapes can be created, edited, picked up, stacked and bashed into other shapes in the scene.

In Arkio you create volumetric shapes that glide on surfaces and snap to the faces and features of other shapes, such as edges or corners. By placing a shape on another shape you automatically create a hierarchy of shapes just like in the real world if you stack objects on another or glue them together.

Arkio supports real-time boolean operations - you can easily create windows, doors any other opening by pressing a new shape inwards through the shape you started drawing on. Every primitive shape in Arkio can act as a solid or a void, and you can easily convert a solid shape to a void by pressing one of its faces into the parent geometry or convert a void into a solid by dragging one of its faces outside of the original shape. When faces are bashed together, the adjoining faces will merge and objects are glued and parented to one other.

To make designing interior spaces easier, Arkio also features parametric hollow shapes that maintain their wall thickness even as you stretch them or skew them.

Working with smart volumetric objects is different from working with traditional CAD tools and offers more intuitive and fast modeling. The resulting volumetric geometry will also be highly accurate and can be exported and reused in other CAD applications.

You can add as much detail as you like in Arkio by duplicating or arraying groups of hosted objects with all attached geometry. When you adjust a parent shape the child's geometry will adjust and resize accordingly, making all geometry you create in Arkio parametric and flexible from the start.

We are interested in your overall thoughts about this way of working and what are key functionalities missing to make this new modeling approach useful in your design process.