---
title: SPOLIA
created: 2026-08-10 11:48
updated: 2026-08-10 16:31
revision: 4
author: Auriea
summary: Link to the new SPOLIA-Supports page
---

[[TROY]]

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.

[[thumb:SPOLIA-proofOfConcept|820px]]

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.

[[thumb:SPOLIA-Shelf|820px]]

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.

[[thumb:SPOLIA-Manipulator|500px]]

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/**.

[[tag:ai]]