Viveport Review: Kodon – Early Access

This free-draw based sculpting app has potential, but ultimately leaves a lot to be desired.

By Joshua Hawkins, Greenlit Content

Virtual reality is great for creating and sharing your works of art, and there are a ton of excellent programs to help light your creative spark. Kodon is just one of many, and while the program has potential. Ultimately, it’s a bit clunky and hard to work with. Of course, it is early access, which means the developer always has room for improvement.

Getting started in Kodon is easy. When you begin a new sculpture, you receive a nice outline of the controls, thanks to some menu options that are portrayed around the controllers. The tough part, though, comes in changing the style of sculpting that you’re doing, or even trying to change the color. I struggled for a long time to get the color to change before finally realizing how to do it. Unlike other programs it isn’t as simple as changing the color by selecting a new one. Instead, you have to find the color you want on the wheel, select it, and then complete a few more jumps through hoops to really get it changed.

Once you have the color, though, and you’re ready to start sculpting, it’s time to pull the trigger and move your hand around. Like other programs, you can easily move around, grab, and rotate the sculpture to make it easier to make changes. Some of the sculpture tools you can use are rough to work with—like the square—but that’s just a minor detail that you can easily work with to perfect your work.

Overall, I found making use of Kodon’s menu very obtuse. Things were far more complicated than they had to be, and to select things on the menu, you had to use a small line from the right-handed controller, and that basically forces you to turn your hand over, which was a bit uncomfortable after doing it a few times. It’s not the best setup for the menu that I’ve seen in an app like this, but like I said above, it is Early Access, which means there is always going to be some room for improvement along the way.

Overall, I feel there isn’t anything that makes Kodon special. There is an assortment of other creative applications out there that do a better job. If the developers can realize the weaknesses that the application has, though, and work to improve them, it definitely has the potential to become something better along the way. It will be interesting to see how the devs use the feedback that users have given them, and I hope that somewhere down the line I can revisit Kodon and be excited about it. For now, though, I’ll stick to other applications that have a smoother user interface, and really make it easier to interact with your work.

Kodon - Early Access is available on Viveport.