Here’s my take on the app after playing with it last night.
It fills in a “niche” that has existed among modeling software for quite some time:
Polygon modeling tools (Blender, 3DS Max) are great for completely arbitrary geometry, but when it comes to making hard surfaces, they mostly suck. This is because making “changes” is tedious and often it’s hard to predict what the final shape will be when using subdivision. It’s also difficult to get a “truly smooth” form from polygon modeling tools without significant amounts of care and probably tweaking of points directly. Boolean tools are mostly useless in ALL these programs as well, because merging the polygon surfaces arbitrarily is a tough problem.
Nurbs modeling tools (Rhino/MOI) offer relatively smooth surfacing, and work well when you need to create “swoopy” hard surface models (like in industrial design), but drawing out the curves can sometimes be a pain and often the interpretation of cuts and merges between surfaces is poor once the geometry becomes quite complex. They also generally create poor polygon export geometry that often ends up useless at seams and intersections. Inexpensive programs like MOI do “ok” with this, but not good enough for general use IMHO. Rhino/MOI and the like are also not that great at maintaining history in the modeling process, so what you get, is often what you’re stuck with unless you do it over.
Solid Modelers (Solidworks/Pro-E) are fantastic for controlling and creating smooth and exact surface geometry, and the ability to go back and modify the modeling operations at any point are pretty much what they’re designed for. However trying to move that geometry into a polygon modeler to sculpt or use traditional poly tools to make “organic” forms and/or use the much better rendering and surfacing tools is a pain in the neck as the polygon exports typically stink and quite a bit is lost in translation. Plus, this type of software is generally quite expensive (Alibre being one of the cheapest, but it doesn’t export poly models of any use).
With Groboto I get the combination of the really smooth surface creation and some “history” that I get in Solid modelers and parts of NURBS modelers, but also really clean usable mesh generation (and I think they’re trying to improve it even more) for when I want to move to Blender, ZBrush, or whatever other polygon modeler. I’ve always wanted to have the power of good boolean tools, because they can be so exact and really quick to model complex surfaces that ends up in a relatively clean polygonal mesh for my final design.
Additionally, there are some really interesting “creative mathematics” features in the program that were the original selling feature. These “bots” can be used to generate interesting organic forms, kind of like 3D fractals on steroids, using primitives that, again, can be remeshed to polygons and exported. Just move some sliders and click some buttons and you can create all kinds of cool weird shapes and structures on the fly and redo them if you don’t like what you see.
All in all it’s pretty fun so far.
They have a sale going on for competitive software + if you advertise by posting on twitter and such, you get a greater discount. I only paid $40 for what is usually $100, so it was a really good deal. Not much money to spend IMHO.
Is there a roadmap for Groboto that’s available to the public? I’m very interested to see where this goes. Correct me if such things are already implemented, but having object/axis snaps and precise scaling controls (working in units, for example) could open up Groboto to making very precise models (I’m thinking furniture, mechanical modeling, sketch modeling for architecture, etc.). The NURBS-like workflow makes a LOT of operations much easier than poly-modeling, so it’d be great to harness that with a greater degree of control.