SPOLIA
SPOLIA is the collage plane. Where METOPE presses layers down onto one fixed relief surface, Spolia lets fragments sit in real 3D and genuinely interpenetrate — weld, carve, overlap — the way spolia are reset into the Arch of Constantine: pieces pulled from different bodies, recombined without pretending to be one original whole, seams left visible on purpose. A .spolia file is the work itself: the arrangement and its stones together, not a finished mesh.
Nothing here ever commits to a mesh while you're working. The whole canvas is one fullscreen raymarched shader reading however many baked SDF fragments are currently placed — a torso, a block, a primitive — as real volumetric fields, not polygons. Union, subtract, intersect, smooth-blend: dragging one fragment through another shows the weld or the carve happening live, every frame, because nothing has been baked into a fixed surface yet. Export to an actual printable object — the one place a mesh has to exist — happens at the very end, via marching cubes over the combined field.
It is such a visual, sensual app to work in: no words anywhere in the interface — every control is a physical object to look at and touch, not a label to read. The whole thing is built as a console sitting in front of the scene, in the register of Bryce and Kai Krause's KPT — dials, sockets, trays, a shelf of objects you drag in rather than pick from a menu.
The shelf along the bottom holds the fragments and primitives available to place — scanned pieces like apollo-fragment, baby-head, eye-block sitting alongside plain cube, sphere, cylinder, pyramid, and a four-headed form — each rendered as a small marble-veined object on a wood-grained tray rather than an icon with a caption.
Placed fragments carry their own manipulator: drag, turn, resize, stretch, all as physical gizmo geometry rather than on-screen sliders, so composing a piece stays a hands-on, sculptural act rather than a form to fill in.
A piece also has to survive being printed. SPOLIA-Supports covers the overhang heatmap and the branching supports Spolia grows into the sculpture — struts that carry their own block material and are meant to be kept rather than snapped off, after the Roman habit of carving the puntello into the marble.
Lives in TROY/SPOLIA (spolia.html, one file, WebGL2, zero dependencies). Companion tools in the same folder bake raw scan meshes into the SDF atlases Spolia places (baker) and manage the fragment library (fragments). Live at https://auriea.art/spolia/.