Reviews

• 

  DM DOKURO

  Oct 11, 2021

  ... Not yet. This program, as it stands, is [i]way[/i] too buggy to even allow for ideal sculpting, which is a damn shame, considering its workflow is top-notch (except for the very strange UI and saving/loading process). The remesher has a horrible tendency to loop itself into a memory-eating [b]mess.[/b] When it [i]does[/i] want to function normally, it fails at that as well. So badly that a sculpture of a cat could end up as some sort of polygonal mosh pit that could be the art piece by itself. With its many improvements over the years, several [i]more[/i] inconveniences grow in its place. For the sculptor, this program is still too unstable to recommend to anyone at this moment.
• 

  White

  Oct 30, 2021

  I like Kodon but cannot recommended on it current state. I will start with short summary and explain in the detail later. -Best concept of VR Modeling application. -Really great modeling tool. -Core operation is very unstable make the program unusable. The program is base on the solid foundation of what VR modeling application should have. Contain Polygon Modeling, Surface Sculpting and Voxel Sculpting all in one package even support standard workflow on monitor screen. Really cool concept. But on real usage experience the program is very buggy If I try to do something except of just to sculpt a sphere I will run in to a bug very fast like in a couple minutes on every session I tried. Most of the bug are not modeling tool but core operation like displaying issues, import/export, corrupt undo/redo, corrupt save file, remesh, mesh management like to duplicate or delete the mesh. I have experience using Gravity and Adobe Medium both of them are very stable. Now the good part modeling tool (as individual tool) work really well but if trying to mix thing together into a workflow like ZBrush or try to do something more advance will run into bug really fast.) Have best feeling of digital sculpting so far even better than ZBrush with just a basic VR controller. I have high hope for Kodon to success but on the other hand be aware it could be just a false promise from TenklLabs as well.
• 

  trancemuter

  Dec 1, 2021

  I want to like this app so much but as it is right now it is just too buggy and underdeveloped and at this price is just not fair when we have Shapelab for 20 bucks and Medium and Gravity Sketch with more features for free! It crashes every time! the tools are underdeveloped, theoretically has nice features but they just don't work in a reliable way, I hope that with the release of 1.O they fix the crashes and the bugs but it is still way overpriced, lacks basic features like good layer handling, like no hierarchical layers, no transparency in layers etc... Their cloth simulation is amazing but crashes all the time. The concept is very good but as it is is still an alpha stage product with a hefty price that is not justifiable IMO. I am looking forward to a bug free version, as it is now, it is almost unusable for me. Shapelab is still in early access yet it is much more stable and polished for a third of the price, granted that is only a poly modeling app while Kodon tries to unite all the different kinds of modeling in one app, that is a great idea, keep up the good work! as it is at the moment I can't recommend it for a pro workflow.
• 

  Dreadnok

  Dec 26, 2021

  After watching this one for a while, I finally caught it on sale and have got to say I am very excited with the project. i was able to jump right in and, with a little time getting used to Smooth tool being a button and not the left trigger, start sculpting. As others have mentioned, it felt a lot like sculpting in Zbrush. Not all of the tools are there, just the ones you'd use the most, so maybe more like sculpting in Sculptris. Still, it gets you there and the tools felt the way I expected them to feel. All around it was much better than I expected, given some of the , in my opinion, overly critical reviews on here. I see a lot of reviews citing that there are bugs and such and that people should wait for the finished product. I disagree. Yes, there are bugs, of which I so far have only seen with the flatten tool, but I've mostly been sculpting so I'm sure there are more. But I wouldn't let those distract from the fantastic tools that work very well. Playing with the fabric tool is one of the coolest things I've seen in vr. From what I've seen, the vast majority of the program works very well. The complaints about the UI, aside from the screen door resolution issue in vr, which is easily fixed, I don't get at all. Things seem organized well and I wasn't confused by any of the menus or symbols. Perhaps those were all from earlier releases. Whatever the case, they don't slow me down. The ability to pull off your headset and be right in desktop mode was pretty useful. In fact, if you didn't use your headset at all, you'd basically have a pretty close to Zbrush sculpting experience for a one time fee. If you aren't familiar with their pricing structure, that's a really big deal. It's an even bigger deal with the bonus of being able to peek into your headset for some three dimensional inspection. The performance was also surprisingly smooth. I'm only on an RX 580, a card that barely qualifies for vr and I had no issues. So I think people need to give it a shot at least. This is the program I want to use. I want to see it get further polish and more features. But I know that takes developer hours and that costs money. My purchase will probably only pay for one hour of that, but that's one hour closer to a finished product, which doesn't feel that far off. Medium was my go-to, but it got bought out and shelved in lieu of another program that's in the works and from the looks of it Kodon is already doing much of what that one will, including the ability to do a seamless hop between desktop and vr. Kodon is doing all the things I wished Medium would have, but never got a chance to. Given that new company's track record, it's going to be an expensive subscription that I'm not interested in paying. That's where I stand on it. Support this project now so they can get where they are headed as soon as possible. Right now, for me at least, Kodon is the best software in the marketplace, and I've tried many. *Update* I've had some time to explore the software a bit more and have encountered a lot more bugs that others have mentioned. Some of these are unfortunately impossible to work around. So in it's present state (1/3/22) it is unusable for a complete project. I still think you should support it and consider it an investment in the finished product, but for now it is more of a demo with some working features.
• 

  PinkRoseSword

  Apr 8, 2022

  Just buy zbrush, buggy menus that disappear when you’re not looking, for some reason many features are on only the desktop window and aren't in the the vr menus, and for some reason aren’t click-able with your vr controllers, which means you need your mouse in front of you to change stuff on the desktop side. its really annoying, and honestly is not a good sculpting alternative. literally learn z-brush or download blender. Like I love the idea, being able to make 3d models in vr. But this isn’t it. Terrible execution. Hopefully it’ll get better in the future, and hopefully the devs keep supporting it. But man this is ROUGH. Not worth the money as it is right now. My model after 20 minutes of work, when I went to remesh it completely disappeared.
• 

  cmgameartist

  May 12, 2022

  Extremely buggy. To the point of being almost unusable. I've had major issues with almost all iterations/patches of this app. Still I find the price I paid at the time,something like 30$ was fine. I was prepared for an "experimental" app,so I'm absolutely not angry or bitter about my initial purchase. But I definitely cannot recommend at this point. The sculpting feeling is great but there is not a single viable workflow that isn't riddled with bugs or glitches.
• 

  fishkeeper94

  Dec 23, 2022

  So this review is a positive, but note that there are a lot of caveats to this review that means this may not be a title you will want to buy yet.

  tl;dr is if you want a fully functional 3D modeling/sculpting tool on purchase, just wishlist this and come back later.

  I believe this product will eventually be one of the best virtual 3D modeling programs out there, but you may notice from the plethora of red reviews is that it's not there yet. The interesting thing to note is that I've seen the product in a much more complete state than its current release, and it was phenomenal: feature rich, intuitive, and compatible with a range of headsets. The problem, though, was it was slow and resource intensive. This is where the problems in development began, and where the lack of dev updates hurt the product. The big deal with this program is that it has sculpting and voxel-based model manipulation/creation. You can manipulate a model like putty, pulling, carving, texturing, etc. and then seamlessly switch to voxel mode to build up and flesh out the sculpt, and then convert it back again to detail the additions. At least, that was the theory. In reality, there was a custom built engine that handled the remeshing and translation of the model between modes, but it wasn't the most effective or reliable. The dev team built up a lot of awesome features in this despite the limitations (cloth sims, lots of brushes, intuitive UI, etc.), but ultimately had to rebuild the engine to be GPU-based to break through the limitations. This is where the negative reviews start to gain merit: the change to the engine ended up breaking pretty much all of the old features, so the devs held off on releasing it. They did not announce this properly, though: the discord just went silent, there was no announcement on Steam beyond a brief blurb in December 2021, and no one could find out what was happening. The last few builds that had dropped were extremely buggy, and finally in mid-2022, we got an announcement: the full release was coming soon! Hope reignited, backers waited...and waited...and waited...crap. After getting a hold of the devs on Discord, the reasoning for the delays and lack of communication was revealed. The positive note here is that the devs opened up some alpha builds on Discord for active testers to get engaged with the new features. With enough engagement, they have now also opened up the Steam product to allow open enrollment into the Alpha, which is what has prompted my review. With new development available to the backers and progress being made every couple weeks, I can throw confidence back behind the product. Please note that as of 12/22/2022, it is not in a fully usable state. If I were reviewing just as is, with no further updates being made, the review would be negative. However, having knowledge of the past working features paired with the tangible progress updates and builds showing the new engine's development, I can say this can end up being one of the best single-cost 3D sculpting tools out there. It just needs some more time to grow, which means this may not be a title you will benefit from jumping immediately, but it is definitely one to keep your eye on if the premise interests you.

• 

  sirkitree

  Jun 4, 2016

  Very good concept, and very much fun. I'm looking forward to some improvements. Here are my suggestions: * using the trigger to mold would be much more intuitive than grips * the mold point on the controller is at the bottom which seems weird and unintuitive. it'd be much better at the point of the controller rather than the bottom * the menu buttons can only be triggerred when you hover over the middle of them. this took me a little to figure out. it'd be better if they highlighted when you touch any part of the button.
• 

  Satyr

  Jun 5, 2016

  Super awesome software with a lots of potential, I think this is so far the app I am going to use the most on the Vive. As a 3D artist I have always thought to myself that it would be so cool to model a 3D object with the ease and intuitivness of the real world, well the thought seem to have turn into reality. The soft is not perfect(not yet ^_~ ), but it truly show an outsanding potential. I believe it could get some real life artists into 3D modeling, because it destroys the interface barrier there is in other modeling apps. Suggestion for improvement: -using the analog trigger to determine the strength of the modification (instead/addition of/to the digital grip to better control the effect. -replace the ring of the controller with another toolhead (so that there is the same tool on both sides ) with the same orientation as the ring -add a join/fusion tool, I was sculpting a skull and when I did the jaw, I began on each side and tried to joined them at the center however the bits did not join. There are so many things that I could add to my feature wishlist but I don't want the dev to get overwhelmed by too many requests/suggestions^^. Maybe later! Excellent work so far and I totally recommend it to anyone who is interested in sculpting 3d models.
• 

  marcel.achard

  Mar 27, 2017

  As many other sculpting vr tools such as Gravity Sketch, Masterpiece VR, Kodon is a promising app and has many great qualities and some flaws. The first good thing is that it's pretty fast when it comes to create blobs and shapes. It's also great that it can import/export .obj files. As a beta app I can live with the fact that it crashes sometimes and that the tools are not very refined. What I really don't like is the draw button on the side controller, as an interface to sculpt with the bottom of the controller, this makes no sense to me. It's not intuitive and lacks precision, also it can't provide levels of pressure as the trigger does. As an artist, I can't hardly understand why it forces me to twist my wrist as all the other menus are accessed in a normal way. The Vive controller makes more sense if you think that you sculpt or paint like you would with your index up. Like all the other sculpting apps it lacks precision when it comes to create subtle marks or shapes such as eyebrows, lips, wrinkles. Selection is always a problem, you're never sure which geometry is active, no clue. Good tools to place the geometries, pin them, group them would be useful. Accessing the different menus, one after the other is not easy. I think it would be better to have successive pages. The top “grab” should be bigger as the X closing tab. It's probably difficult for programmers to use the sensitive pads to modify the size of the tools maybe there are not enough degrees for precise steps. As the developers specify, there is about 20% of the tools there, so it is promising, and worth the money so that these guys can continue their work. So even with the bugs and all, I recommend this software.
• 

  Eidmann

  Jun 1, 2017

  Kodon has been an exciting and frustrating experience for me. I am absolutely thrilled that I can sculpt in thin air in front of myself and create something that feels to be real. This software has so much potential, it's tear inducing, but it is, however, still very flawed. My number one issue with Kodon as it stands now (beta version 5.0, I believe) is the linear, destructive workflow. I literally cannot think of a more frustrating quality for an artistic medium to have than a linear workflow; except not having an undo feature (Kodon does have an undo/redo feature, but it can be shotty and you cannot undo clearing the scene if you click the clear button*). I have run into issues with this setup more times than I can recall and have never found a linear workflow helpful in any scenario. The headset tracking seems to glitch a bit as well, it seems to happen after working on a project for longer than about 10 minutes. I think it may have something to do with whatever is the mechanism behind why the polygon limit is so low.** I am very excited for the upcoming update which I have been lead to believe will resolve at least a few of these issues. I have high hopes for Kodon, and I can't wait to see the final product. I just can't stop messing with it; I get so easily frustrated because I'll accidentally delete something I can't retrieve, or the app will crash and I have to restart my computer before it'll even open back up, etc. but I keep coming back. *The (irreversible) "Clear" button is at the top of the tool menu, just above where one would select a brush type and is one of the biggest buttons on the menu **Kodon has a Polygon limit of 60000, I have heard that this is temporary, but it is still a huuuge restriction I hope this review is helpful and doesn't scare anyone out of trying it, because it really is amazing, it is just overtly unfinished. -Tif5f
• 

  Coverop

  Nov 9, 2017

  [h1]Almost like Zbrush.... ALMOST[/h1] [i]Note: I've tested several VR sculpting programs such as: Medium , MasterpieceVR , Gravity Sketch VR and few more[/i] Kodon has a potential to be one of the best VR sculpting tools... but It still has a long way.
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  eximious94

  Nov 30, 2017

  For the sketching stage, Kodon really nails it. And the more updates comes along, the longer I can work productively on each model, wich is very promising. Even though Kodon currently has some limitations on resolution and brush capacity/flexibility, I still find myself creating better base meshes in a much shorter time than in ZBrush. Kodon has massive potential, and it's already usefull for prefessional work. It's also a great way to start your work day, cause it's such a joy to work with.
• 

  Krampus

  Jan 19, 2018

  Having tried 3 sculpting apps for VR (Oculus Medium, Masterpiece VR, Kodon) I feel like Kodon is the only one with legs. While the others are usable only Kodon doesn't feel like a toy that is only intended as a toy. No, it isn't as "polished" currently and it is deffinently missing some of it's features but the roadmap and outlook looks solid. What there is here is evidence of developers understanding what a VR modeling app needs to become and the ability to do it with time. Performance is 5 times better for me than MPVR or Medium and the interface takes itself seriously... when I want to get work done I don't need bloom or a "fun" sound effect when I access an already goopy interface and tools. The evidence of poly tools gets me excited. Not being constrained to a voxel cube is a relief. Kodon has a very long way to go but the roots are solid.
• 

  Kyle is Legally a Hero!

  Dec 11, 2018

  Missing a ton of key features advertised in the videos. No vertex modeling anymore "exists in older betas".. A lot of tools just do nothing when they worked in older builds of the program. They seem to be rebuilding the software to do more and its breaking a lot of important tools. Which is part of development but shouldn't be part of your public builds. They essentially haven't released a public version of this with the full suite of tools, just examples of the tools to be removed later. You are better off with a voxel focused program like MasterpieceVR right now since they essentially removed every useful function they had over the competition in the last build... Nice flattening brush through, guys. That would be awesome if I could smooth too. "Seriously.. Poly smoothing is gone now." The only reason I haven't refunded is this is that I can see it being good down the line and I hope my 30 bucks will help. I'll happily change my review in the future "I hope".. I do wish the developers luck.. But come on.. Its been a long time. tl;dr: Wait for another major update or two unless you are just looking to support the devs. (12/11/18 - Date Reviewed)
• 

  Spudtagus

  Feb 6, 2019

  I don't recommend, still a bit buggy and can even just delete all your hard work for no reason, If you want to use this programe you should save every couple of minutes.
• 

  Stellarspiff

  May 24, 2019

  Seems too simplistic for sculpting detailed models. Just the sphere brush as far as I can tell. I bought this thinking that it would have more features and better for modeling than Oculus Medium, but Medium has so many more features at the moment. Easier navigation, more assets to work from, ability to make your own stamps and use them as brushes, move tool that you can alter the mesh with and has an elastic function that really helps with organic modeling, layers and groups that you can change on a whim, and you can merge groups once you have them set where you want them. So far, these 2 programs are the only VR modeling tools I have tried, but Medium is so much easier and user friendly.
• 

  MEEPLE

  Mar 6, 2021

  This software has so much potential. So much fun to actually model in real time. Unfortunately between losing my meshes over a dozen times. and the terrible save system. I cannot recommend this to anyone in the current state it is in.
• 

  Ganjah

  Jul 6, 2021

  Still early in the development. Far from optimized and cranks my CPU for pretty basic tasks. I would say it would be worth it at the $30 price point, but they just DOUBLED the price with no explanation or justification as to why. It's a really cool piece of software that builds on so many components that are lacking with Adobe Medium and I'm really excited for what the future has in store for Kodon! In this moment though, I cannot recommend this program, especially for $60 EDIT: They just released an update that allows you to use your GPU for some things! Going to definitely check it out and update my review accordingly.
• 

  darkangel78

  Apr 26, 2022

  After 11 hours of playing, sculpting, forming, and experimenting with the more demanding of the tasks CPU wise, I Love this application. Fortunately i grabbed it when it was still $30ish. If you've used any programs for design or poly-mapping, then you also know these applications can be HELLA- Demanding on a CPU due to what's going on and whether or not you've dedicated your PC for just these purposes. (Make sure you leave some breathing room for your PC, Like at least an extra 20gigs for your work) Kodon is NOT a TOY...... Its an immersive 360 degree canvas for art, expression and dedicated design. The new price mark was fortold a few months ago, now it weeds out the tinkerers and not so dedicated. Its worth the $60, But make sure you leave 20gigs of kodon memory space aside to create or your PC will brain freeze alot. AMAZING PROGRAM!! A must for any artist.