SILO – THE LITTLE MODELLER THAT CAN
After garnering popularity with its ‘modelling zen’ approach, Silo quickly became a staple for many. But then it went quiet…
What’s the latest with this boxmodelling software?
B ack in the late noughties, Nevercenter’s Silo was quickly becoming a modelling staple on multiple platforms for many. But just when it seemed they were doing well, with an increasing user base and recognition, it suddenly went very, very quiet. Until September 2017, when the lights came back on with a bang and a fresh release. Where the hell have they been? After holding our horses to see if the lights were back on for real, we recently reached out to Thomas Plewe, creator and founder of Nevercenter – creators of Silo, camera software and games. And of course, our first questions were: Where have you been? What the hell happened?
The answer contained less drama than we suspected. In addition, the #Pcmasterrace may be pleased to hear we might be able to blame Apple for Silo’s lengthy absence. As Tom puts it: “We’ve always been about creating tools we want to work with ourselves, in our own projects. We’ve been lucky in that we’re a tiny company which earns enough money to allow us to work on our own terms, on our own time, rather than being a hard moneymaking machine. On a whim, we’d just created a tool called Camerabag when the App Store opened. And the response we got was overwhelming. It quickly reached #1 on the App Store sales charts. It won major awards. At the time, it was the only application capable of doing old-type camera emulation and other image enhancements. This shifted our focus from Silo, slowing down its development, while we were able to work on image processing stuff, including a desktop version of Camerabag, which also did very well. We also got – and get – to enjoy having full autonomy over what kind of software we create or work on. When the photo-tool market calmed down, we saw the rise of the indie game-maker scene, and we dipped our toes in there as well, winning yet another award. These combinations kept putting Silo on the back burner.”
When pointing out Silo’s back burnering was a fairly long one, it turned out the application was never out of use at Nevercenter, as it was one of the internal creative backbones at the company during their long, dark teatime of the public modelling soul. The income from Camerabag allowed the team to pursue another passion, namely creating 2D indie games for Android and IOS, including the award-winning Shibuya Grandmaster, and
Bear Winter. Nevercenter also started work on their own game engine, for a hitherto unpublished golf game. Silo was the sole modeller used to create the graphics for it, and one of the things it taught the