Valence 3D

I’ve paid for this app. very early on, when it first came out, or nearly so. It wasn’t a great app., but I figured it would greatly improve. Sadly, this is not the case. As the app. stands today, it should be free. The interface is clunky and there is a major flaw that I have seen from early on. For some reason, when a file is saved, then reopened later, it sometimes reverts back to a primitive. I think a square. Even the built in designs do this. I have tried reinstalling the app., but the same thing happens. Valence 3D is the only app. I have file “corruption” issues with. Very disappointing. I originally paid for this, since it seemed to have more primitives, than Nomad Sculpt had. I planned on using it for the purpose of starting with a primitive in Valence, then working on it to a certain point, before moving it to Nomad for detailed work. Since Valence doesn’t work, I now use Autodesk Tinkercad for this purpose. I used this app. way before Valence was created, but Valence seemed to have a future, where the editing workflow would have been better. Since this major flaw with Valence, I have ditched it for Tinkercad long ago, but would try Valence every now and then to see if it satisfactorily improved and hoped it would become an awesome app. that I would use frequently. I’m giving up today and uninstalling.

This it’s a pretty solid program and I look forward to see its progress. Right now it’s not “fun” to use and I find myself wanting to quit the program due to frustration. It’s clunky in a way that you cannot customize the interface. I am constantly selecting tools from all over, especially the ones I use the most. I would like to move tools around to better fit my work flow or alter the tool bar to a tool window which would have multiple short rows of tools instead of one long one that you have to scroll up to access all the tools. I feel that it takes me longer to model something low poly than it should. Right now I know a big part of it is the learning curve, but the other part is the limitations of the program. I find the gizmo gets in my way when trying to select vertexes. The orbital rotation feels off not sure if it’s reversed or just user error. All in all not bad and can’t wait for future updates.

I already use Shapr on my iPad for hard surface modeling, but wanted to give this a shot since Shapr is a pretty pricey subscription and doesn’t really do vertex or face manipulation since it’s CAD software. It’s solid. You can get most of what you need done with its built in primitives and adding loops. The ui is solid enough and overall it works great. It really needs some simple Boolean tools though to round itself out and make it shine. It would also benefit from being able to extrude shapes on a curve. It’s snapping isn’t great but it gets the job done, and it could use a few more selection tools (like being able to select a loop easily). A way to inset a grid divide instead of just poke or inset would be great too instead of just have it to cut a bunch of loops. That said it feels like it could be for hard surface, low poly modeling what Nomad ended up being for sculpting with some time.