Organic shapes with the agent

Some things are all about precision: a bracket, an enclosure, a gear. Others are all about the form: a computer mouse that fits your hand, a vase with a twist, a pebble paperweight, a little bird for the shelf. Solid Vibes builds both, and the agent picks the right way for each request on its own.

Three ways to build

For every request, the agent first decides how the thing should be modelled:

• Classic. Functional, precise parts made from sketches, extrusions, holes and rounded edges. Brackets, boxes with lids, gears, wall mounts, spacers, clips, hinges, knobs, hooks, phone stands. These stay classic, even if you ask for smooth edges.
• Organic. The form is the design. The agent sculpts a smooth body, like clay, or makes a flowing shape through a few cross-sections. A mouse, a vase, a toy figure, an ergonomic grip, a wavy bowl, a lamp shade, a chess pawn.
• Hybrid. A smooth form that must also hold real parts. The agent sculpts the form first, then adds precise features on it: screw posts, a USB-C cutout, button holes, a battery cavity, a flat base. A pebble-shaped speaker, a controller with buttons, a lamp with a socket.

You can see which one it chose in the agent trace. Every organic shape ends up as a normal solid, so holes, rounded edges, exports, the printability check and slicing all work on it.

What to ask

Say what it is, how big it is, and how it should feel. Words like smooth, flowing, ergonomic, sculpted, curvy or like a pebble tell the agent the form matters.

Make me a smooth ergonomic computer mouse, 120 mm long.

A tall vase with a twisting, flowing shape, about 220 mm tall, open at the top.

A pebble paperweight, smooth and heavy-looking, palm size.

A bird figurine for my shelf, about 80 mm tall.

Creatures, characters and figures

For anything with legs, arms, a neck, a tail, ears or branches, the agent draws a skeleton first — a stick figure the shape grows around — and grows one smooth body over it. Legs, neck and tail flow into the body with no creases or seams, the left and right sides match exactly, and the result prints as a single piece. Then it adds shallow details (eyes, a mouth, toes) and a flat base so it stands on its feet.

A cute cartoon dinosaur with a long neck, four stubby legs and a tail, about 160 mm long.

A small teddy bear with round ears and its arms out to the sides, 120 mm tall.

A happy toy dinosaur for my 4 year old, 180 mm long, made of PLA.

When a part really has to be separate (an ear, a back plate, a horn), the agent sinks it into the body and rounds the seam so it melts in — never a ball stuck onto a ball, which looks like balloons and breaks at the seam. Small details stay printable: eyes, nostrils and a smile become shallow dents or bumps on the surface (about 1–2 mm), not deep holes or loose balls. Toys for small children get chunky legs and no thin spikes.

Changes work the same way — "make the belly rounder", "a longer neck", "thicker legs" — the agent moves the skeleton's joints or makes them thicker, and the body follows.

Detailed characters from a concept or photos

When your workspace has the body generator, a character, figurine, creature or ornament built from a concept sheet or a reference picture is generated from the pictures instead of grown from a skeleton: it keeps the face, the toes, the spikes and the folds, and comes out smooth. The trace says Generated the shape from your concept sheet. It is a mesh body: you can resize it with sliders, cut pockets and holes, hollow it with drain holes, split it to fit your printer and add parts, and proportion changes ("make the neck longer") become shape sliders — but it has no sculpting cage, so for simple forms (a pebble, a mouse, a vase) the agent keeps sculpting. See Working with meshes. It costs 150 credits on top of the build, charged only when the body arrives. See Turning a concept into a detailed 3D body.

For a hybrid, name the parts it must fit:

A pebble-shaped Bluetooth speaker housing for a 40 mm driver, with a USB-C port at the back and four screw posts inside.

An ergonomic computer mouse with a USB cutout at the front and a battery compartment underneath.

Shaping it further

Ask for changes in plain words. The agent reshapes the existing body instead of starting over:

Make the back of the mouse a bit higher and slim the middle where my thumb goes.

Give the vase a narrower neck and a crisp edge at the rim.

If you want a classic part to look softer, say so ("make this bracket smooth and flowing"). If you want an organic request built the precise way, say that too ("keep it geometric, flat faces only").

Printing organic shapes

Rounded shapes rarely have a flat side, so they rock and need supports. The agent adds a flat base (it cuts the bottom flat by a millimetre or two) and tells you to print it standing on it. If a proposal still has no flat base, the preview card says so, and you can ask:

Give it a flat base so it sits on the print bed.

Organic overhangs under about 45° print without supports. Steeper ones (the underside of a bird's beak, a mouse's front lip) may need supports; the printability check in Make shows where.

From a concept to a sculpted model

When you hand a concept from the Concept Board to Build and its form is organic, the agent:

1. reads the outline of the subject in the front, side and top views of the turnaround sheet,
2. builds a starting shape that matches those three outlines at your real dimensions — or, for a creature or character, draws a skeleton from the front and side views,
3. for a skeleton, fits it to the sheet in a second or two: it makes each joint thicker or thinner (and moves joints a little) until the body's outlines match the three views,
4. sculpts from it and adds the flat base and any precise features,
5. looks at what it built: it puts the model next to the sheet, view by view (front, side, top and the three-quarter view), with the differences coloured in (red where the model is missing something the concept has, blue where it has too much). It sees how closely each outline matches and which part is off ("the neck is too short in the side view"), fixes it — moving or thickening a skeleton joint, or reshaping the body — and looks again,
6. stops as soon as every view matches at least 85 %, when another pass stops helping, or after three extra passes, and keeps the version that matched best.

You can follow it in the agent trace: each look shows up as look check with the match per view. Afterwards, the visual check on the preview compares the outlines once more: below 82 % in any view it makes one more pass to fix the biggest difference.

If the geometry engine is too slow to answer while the agent works, it tries once more with extra time. If it still can't build the model to look at it, the agent tells you plainly that the shape isn't verified yet, and the preview card shows Not checked yet with a Check again link instead of a green "Looks right".

The same look-while-building happens when you attach your own turnaround (front and side views of one object) and ask for an organic build.

Real sizes and limits

The numbers you give are read for what they are. "Overall length, snout to tail: 180 mm" sets the size, and the other sizes follow the sheet's proportions. A limit such as "printer build height: 220 mm" or "fits on a shelf no taller than 120 mm" only caps the size: the model is made to fit under it, and the agent adds it as a rule, but it never becomes the object's own height.

See Why concept images are intent, not geometry for how the real sizes and the image work together.

Costs

Organic builds cost the same as any other build: a new model is a multi-step build, and a change to it is an edit. A generated body (a detailed character from a concept or photos) adds 150 credits, only when it is delivered. The look-while-building passes are part of that build, with no extra charge, and the outline check after a concept hand-off is part of the normal visual check.

Limits

• The agent sculpts from a small set of starting shapes (pebble, capsule, soft box, ring, bottle, mouse body, handle loop, stand), from the concept's outline, or from a skeleton for creatures and characters. Very detailed forms, such as faces, fingers or lettering on a curved surface, come out simplified — unless the body is generated from the pictures (see Turning a concept into a detailed 3D body).
• A skeleton body is smooth and rounded everywhere: crisp edges, flat faces and thin details (claws, spikes, fingers) come from extra steps or come out soft. Limbs that leave the body very close together, or a joint that sits inside a much thicker one, can't grow cleanly — the agent then spreads them apart or makes the body a little slimmer and tells you.
• Outlines are compared by shape, not size, and only as silhouettes: a match says the proportions and parts are in the right place, not that every detail is there.
• Outlines are read from the turnaround sheet's white background. Busy or shadowed sheets fall back to a rougher outline from the image description. A view that is drawn in perspective or posed differently from the others (say, a head turned up to the camera in the top view) counts for less, or is left out.
• Thin organic walls can print poorly. Keep walls at least 1.6 mm, or ask for a solid body.