Plasticity, is it viable?

guitarguy00

Hey guys, not sure if this topic has been brought up before. I did a search and found nothing on it. A few YouTubers have mentioned this program and I took a quick look at it and immediately knew it was not polygon-based or even CAD based. Turns out it is Nurb-based which I experimented briefly with in Maya about 5 years ago.

What is the general consensus on this one? Is it useful for game art? How is the workflow when it comes to making a low poly? Is it the future or is it overrated flash in the pan like Voxels etc?

GlowingPotato

Here, watch this. It will answer your questions. 

The END of Blender!? - YouTube

Noors

Useful for hard surface high poly yes. It can probably provide a good base for low poly aswell. CAD uses NURBS so i'm not sure about the distinction you make. You don't have any production constraint tho so it's more "artsy". It looks more user friendly than Rhino/Fusion (not even mentioning stuff like Solidworks)  and more complete than Moi3D (?), but it's nothing really new. IMO hard surface modelers should dive into such software, yes.

guitarguy00

Noors said:

Useful for hard surface high poly yes. It can probably provide a good base for low poly aswell. CAD uses NURBS so i'm not sure about the distinction you make. You don't have any production constraint tho so it's more "artsy". It looks more user friendly than Rhino/Fusion (not even mentioning stuff like Solidworks)  and more complete than Moi3D (?), but it's nothing really new. IMO hard surface modelers should dive into such software, yes.

Ahhh didn't know Fusion/Moi3d etc used Nurbs too, interesting. Lots of good info, thanks for that.

poopipe

It looks nice enough and I'd like to give it a try.
but...  
I'm not sure it really offers anything over fusion360 to justify the price for non-commercial use and you're giving up a bunch of the nice stuff that comes with the autodesk/fusion ecosystem (project management etc.). 

gnoop

is it non-destructive ?  Modifiers based?    Meshed export without shading artifacts?

Bek

gnoop said:

is it non-destructive ?  Modifiers based?    Meshed export without shading artifacts?

Destructive. But being cad some things are still editable, like boolean a hole in something, you can move the hole around afterwards just fine. I haven't done extensive testing but the vnormals out seem fine at a glance.

Personally I really enjoy plasticity, though it's technically less powerful than say Fusion 360. You could think of it as a halfway point between blender and f360 — really fast intuitive cad modelling but without modifiers/history stack. I think hard surface concept artists would love it. You can just fire it up and start messing around with shapes without having to think about the software much at all. But then you'll definitely miss the procedural stuff when you say, go to boolean an array of objects, find it doesn't look exactly right, have to ctrl+z a bunch, tweak some stuff, redo the array, redo the boolean, repeat until you get what you want. I also miss the precision of fusion's sketch tools, but plasticity is more about speed.

and you're giving up a bunch of the nice stuff that comes with the autodesk/fusion ecosystem (project management etc.).

Personally I see that as a win, but obviously a very situation thing. I remember a coworker losing a bunch of work in f360 because a poweroutage (no internet even though ups kept pc's on) meant he couldn't save or export, I forget why, but something about their cloud system failed and he was just SoL. Plasticity doesn't have any always-online requirements.

Anyway, there's a 30d trial and it's not very expensive either, I'd at least encourage giving it a go — it takes no time at all to jump into. There's some great short feature videos from William Vaughn to help get you started:

here's some recent stuff I've done in the program:

gnoop

Thanks greentooth.  How it is vs Moi3d?

Bek

Dunno, I've only ever used Moi to export ngon obj's from fusion .iges/step (something plasticity also does natively)

gnoop

Thanks Bek.   I tried it for a bit  and lit looks pretty much Moi like . I still think Moi is a bit more convenient although or maybe I am just more accustomed to it.