Pillow is a lightweight 3D polygon modeler inspired by Silo.

Back in 2003, during the SARS outbreak in Beijing, schools shut down and I suddenly had a very long summer break. Out of boredom, I picked up 3D Studio Max and quickly fell in love with computer graphics.

A few years later, in 2006, I wrote Pillow — a project I was very proud of at the time. I didn’t know about half-edge or winged-edge data structures, so I invented my own. The first version was built with wxWidgets, and during graduate school I even attempted a rewrite with Qt and a more mature data structure. That effort was never finished, but the original code survived on an old hard drive.

I’ve uploaded it here for nostalgia’s sake, and maybe one day I’ll modernize it with WASM and WebGPU.

As for the name: at first I called it Cedar (for reasons I can’t remember). But while testing subdivision, I always started with a cube. After several iterations, the cube would round out into something soft and pillow-like. The name stuck.

Here are some of the original screenshots: