The most amazing abandoned 3D sketching program
polycounter lvl 7
Of all the sketch to 3D program I have came across, this is the closet that come to real magic because of the lattice tool, so much so that I have to make a video to tell people about it.
If you guys have any connections with people who make those magical drawing to 3D app that seems to be stuck in white paper purgatory, please let me know ;p
Replies
Wow, you put it so elegantly, yes, what a way to describe how some programs just click with some people.
No worries ;p
Another tool in that same space is Curvy3D, which lets you create shapes out of 3 profile curves drawn freehand. It has quite a few other features to keep working from there (sculpting, remeshing, booleans) but unfortunatly it somewhat blows when it comes to handling symmetry. Kindof fun and useful still, I've used it a few times to generate a bunch of "profiled potatoes" to later assemble into refined concept blockouts in Blender.
http://www.curvy3d.com/
The irony is that indeed, pretty much no professional 3D artist (in the sense of : paid to build models based on concepts) will ever really need that, because at that stage the profiles and cross sections are already figured out in the model sheet so there is not much point going to a sketch-based app to establish these profiles.
But for the 2d-oriented person (not 2d as in "unable to think in 3d" but rather 2d as in "thinking of 3d shapes not as deformed blobs but rather in terms of profile curves and cross-sections like an industrial designer would"), this kind of approach is indeed extremely natural and in many ways faster that sculpting from a sphere. It also completely removes the need to constantly rotate the viewport. Draw the cross sections, done.
Personally I've been doing just that directly in Blender by drawing networks of polygon lines to define profiles and cross sections, and then shrinkwrapping a potato shape over that. It's not live as in Teddy/Easytoy/Curvy but it gives pretty much the same end result and allows for more precise editing of the curves and sections after the fact. The resulting shape is not round and smooth though, more like some fabric stretched over a wire frame, which I actually quite like.
This approach also gels very well with the design principle that states that a curve should almost always conform to one plane as opposed to twisting in space, as that leads to much more powerful and readable surfaces. Whereas sculpting tends to favor the opposite.
Fun topic, thank you for bringing it up. Could have been more clear about the app in question though, had to click around the vid past the intro to figure out what you were *actually* referring to, and you didn't even mention the name a single time