Spline: mini-room

Overview

I've always wanted to create one of those mini-room design - decided to try it out when I was introduced to Spline.

View the model on Spline directly for a better experience.

Making this workspace is great for testing the tool too. It has a mixture of geometric and organic elements like desks, plants, clothing, etc to test out the different functionality of a 3D modelling tool.

It took me around 12 hours (span across few days) to work on this design and I am quite happy working with Spline throughout.

The interface is familiar

I tried some of the major 3D design tools on Spline in the process of creating the mini-room: drawing 2D shapes, extrusion, drawing 3D shapes like a cylinder, setting lights and more. Here goes my overall process of how I approach the design:

1. Basic modelling of the room, furnitures, and objects
2. Adding textures and colors to the models
3. Setting up the different light sources
4. Fine tuning the position, materials, and lighting of the scene
5. Setting the camera
6. Exporting

Most of the tools I used are familiar as someone who work mostly in 2D. I liked the simplicity - especially when there are no hiding and showing to find the right tools. Left is the layer panel and the right is for the properties of objects.

Spline UI

I enjoyed how the assets are easily accessible and the setup is super quick - just set the properties and they are there for me to reuse.

Setting material assets

The search tool is very helpful as my layers grew (I am glad that shortcuts like cmd+R and cmd+G works!). Unexpectedly it's much more responsive than I'd imagine.

Search tool

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Some wishes

• More loading indication - for when the tool is rendering so I get instant response on my action
• Quick access to doc on tools - I find myself going between the tool and the notion doc, it will be great if there is a way to easily navigate to the specific area of the doc from the tool
• Stronger modelling capabilities for basic shapes (e.g. subtract and add shapes together)
• Shortcuts for the arrow tool and the pen tool for easier vector editing
• Snap and align - it'll be great if I can easily align objects by their edges / surfaces
• Focus mode - to reduce distraction and lag while editing a specific object in the scene
• More powerful 3D design capabilities that we see in other dedicated 3d design application like Blender

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Further exploration in the future

There are more I'd like to try:

• Learn more about modelling, lighting and rendering
• Creating animated scenes
• Understanding what "state" is
• Sculpting tools for more complex models
• Embedding in an mobile app

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