Chisel - SDF modeling for blender

[rrtk]

Hey guys.

This is the official thread for my SDF addon,

This is a fully custom raymarching renderer; models use mathematical distance fields instead of traditional mesh geometry. Shapes are perfectly smooth at any resolution, booleans blend seamlessly, and you see results in real-time

The idea was to match blender modeling system with the default selection, scale, and modifiers system.

You can get it from my sperhive
https://superhivemarket.com/creators/ezelar/?ref=8329

[3dioot]

You conveniently left out the commercial tag.

35 personal
60 indie
160 studio

Anyone used this? I haven’t seen any wip threads for this addon or alpha or beta tests. How does it shape up versus conjure or mathops (which both are still in development)?

[rrtk]

It’s fully featured. With core written in GLSL, like conjure and Rust backend for other stuff like mesh generation.

I used it myself in a commercial environment.

I don’t think there will be a particular change in rendering since everyone is using the same GLSL system. It’s more a matter of interface and Blender integration. I wrote multiple popular Blender addons before, including Hardops and Boxcutter, so I expect it to slowly evolve to better and better shape, even if it is not there yet.

[3dioot]

Oh wow you are the Hardops and Boxcutter developer. Well that does inspire a lot of confidence in the quality of this addon.

I already own conjure but the next release does not seem to be anywhere close and development is going at a snails pace.

Mathops also looked interesting but the developer recently switched it from addon to fork which, while powerful and unlocking options, also complicates things to a degree.

I am really “just” looking for something that allows me to model with SDF’s in a quick and fluent fashion so I can easily create shapes and iterate in ways that would take me much more time with other modeling methods.

I guess Ill have to check this out sooner rather than later. Hopefully this can be the one to rule them all

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

@rrtk

I wrote multiple popular Blender addons before, including Hardops and Boxcutter

You really should add this to your marketing.

And I’m sure @Metin_Seven will both add it to his SDF thread and buy it also.

[Metin_Seven]

Interesting, thanks for introducing your SDF add-on.

It looks promising. Could you post a video of how the curve shapes perform in your ray-marcher?

Nice to see Dual Contouring being a meshing option. Are there nested / grouped shapes yet?

And I assume coloring, and converting those into mesh vertex colors, isn’t implemented yet?

And… An important question for me… Does it also work in Blender on MacOS, or do you use NVIDIA-specific features for your ray-marcher?

@rrtk

I wrote multiple popular Blender addons before, including Hardops and Boxcutter,

But you’re not Masterxeon, are you? Hard Ops and Boxcutter are developed by Masterxeon, and sold by a different store on Superhive.

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

@Metin_Seven

But you’re not Masterxeon, are you? Hard Ops and Boxcutter are developed by Masterxeon

MasterXeon was just a beta tester and ideas assistant. He wasn’t the programmer, as far as I know.

[KenzoCG]

I also worked with them back in the day but yes AR was the person who originated the tools. He created the first version of Hard-Ops and BoxCutter. AR then created the Hard-Ops active tool where you can adjust all the modifiers in a dynamic and visual way.
MasterXeon was a front man, creating release logs and videos, advertising, testing and using the tools at the highest level, suggesting feedback and handling user communications, and worked with people on new ideas.
But yeah, AR and MasterXeon are the originators and then a team of developers eventually surrounded its development.

Even back in the day, AR was a clever guy.
He knows how to get around lol!

[rrtk]

Yeah, I’m not Jerry, I’m a coder behind the tools.
This is my personal project, team is not involved.

no Nvidia specific stuff, or it will be impossible to support all.
Still, metal sometimes fails, though, but that is a matter of me not having a lot of metal experience. Should get stable along the way. I don’t see a reason why not.

Just pure mesh and baking only to planes so far. I don’t think coloring and more rendering will be useful for the scope of the project. It was created to help with modeling, not as a full render option. So my bigger priority will be rather sdf to brep transition in future.

I guess the ray marcher itself is not anything innovative, same stuff all other modeling programs do.

The difference is the connection to the blender. Interface and booleans work like blender modifier system. So you can boolean one shape to any other, and it is a modifier stack that orders the rendering. similar to a blender.

[Metin_Seven]

@KenzoCG

AR and MasterXeon are the originators and then a team of developers eventually surrounded its development.

@rrtk

Yeah, I’m not Jerry, I’m a coder behind the tools.

Thanks for the info. Learned something again. I always had the impression that Hard Ops and Boxcutter were Jerry / MasterXeon’s one-man projects.

@rrtk

no Nvidia specific stuff, or it will be impossible to support all.
Still, metal sometimes fails, though, but that is a matter of me not having a lot of metal experience. Should get stable along the way. I don’t see a reason why not.

That’s great. There are a few quirks on the Blender API side when it comes to Metal. The developer of ConjureSDF has recently submitted some issues to the Blender devs. Here’s an example. Hopefully those will be fixed soon.

@rrtk

Just pure mesh and baking only to planes so far. I don’t think coloring and more rendering will be useful for the scope of the project. It was created to help with modeling, not as a full render option.

OK. I hope you’ll consider color blending as well, as it can be a great aid in painting, texturing and sculpting once converted to mesh vertex colors. For example, black and white tinted areas (with a grayscale transition in the blend) can be used as masks in Sculpt Mode, and used as boundaries for painting / texturing.

I also hope nested / grouped shapes will soon be added, as that significantly improves modeling intricate shapes.

I’ve added Chisel to the Blender add-ons section of my Big SDF Thread, and I’m looking forward to following its development.

[Metin_Seven]

My first model made using Chisel.

[rrtk]

New version was released.

Chisel 2.0.0

Now fully Rust-backed: SDF evaluation, mesh generation, and the
viewport renderer are all native (armesher PyO3 crate, wgpu-based).
Cross-platform wheels for Windows, Linux, and macOS, on Blender 4.5
(Python 3.11) and Blender 5.x (Python 3.13).

New

• Chisel active tool — click in the viewport to spawn primitives
• Alt+Q activates the tool from anywhere in the 3D view
• Spawn at 3D cursor with World / View / Cursor alignment
• Quick-boolean hotkeys (Alt+- / = / \ and the numpad equivalents)
• D opens a tool-local shape picker; Shift+A opens a Chisel add submenu
• Active-tool gizmo system — arc cluster + modifier dots
• Materials with a real shader editor (Matcap Shader, Mix Shader, Color, Field, Material Output)
• Per-primitive node-tree colours in the RENDERED viewport
• Lockstep colour blending — colour seam tracks the geometric seam exactly
• Per-shader Blend socket (world units) — bleed colour into neighbours even on hard booleans
• Per-modifier Material Blend multiplier — soften or sharpen just the colour seam
• Mix Shader with a Field input — paint a second colour inside another SDF object
• Veil / Unveil hotkeys (Alt+V, Shift+Alt+V) for bulk hiding non-rendered helpers
• DISPLACE modifier (unifies the old Emboss / Engrave pair)
• Polygon-based curve SDF with smooth Phong-style normals (replaces the Bezier solver)
• Bake mode (renamed from Data) ported to the wgpu backend
• Modal family: profile hotkeys, accept-on-release, shared palette
• Preferences with Info / Theme / Debug tabs
• Customisable gizmo colours
• Cross-platform wheels for Windows, Linux, and macOS (cp311 + cp313)

Performance

• Tile-based renderer — one fullscreen pass iterates per-tile primitive lists
• Unified single-primitive pipeline (512-slot cap)
• Per-chain primMeta SSBO with OP_BOOL_SCOPE short-circuit
• Stable chain slots — skip scene-SSBO writes on unchanged chains
• Depth-driven adaptive ray-march step budget
• Pooled per-frame UBOs across submits
• Tile culler skips fully behind chains
• Empty-scene clear frame cached and reblitted instead of re-uploaded
• Material pack skipped for empty chains
• Epoch-based stale-tile skipping in the worker

Fixed

• Hard colour line where two materials met on a union — now blends smoothly with Blend > 0
• Difference / subtract colour seam — cutter colour bleeds into the carved surface properly
• Black lines on the Boolean intersections of curve primitives
• Curve “rounding inflation” at high rounding values
• Silent matcap fallback while the Rendered shader was still compiling
• Standalone primitives now show their material colour in RENDERED mode (matches chains)
• Crash on undo when caches still pointed at freed Blender objects
• Viewport not re-rendering after object delete/add
• Mesh objects ignored SDF depth in the viewport composite
• “Draw Mesh Objects” toggle no longer respected
• Duplicate object sharing the source’s mesh proxy
• Matcap specular not uploaded; Matcap-tab edits not refreshing in real time
• Restricted-context crash from fix_shared_node_trees on file load
• Chain silhouette clipping at grazing angles or near other primitives
• Stale shading after undo/redo (chain caches now drop)
• Dangling StructRNA references at draw time
• Tooltip / redo-panel polish on select-active, veil, and unveil

Compatibility

• Blender 4.5.7+ and 5.x — wheels for both Python 3.11 and 3.13
• Existing 1.2.0 scenes load unchanged
• Materials without a Blend socket use the new default (0.0 = lockstep with geometric blend, identical to old behaviour)
• Curve objects pick up the new polygon SDF without any scene edits

Chisel tutorial.

[Aox8ha]

Hi!
Does it have a mesh to SDF function?

[Metin_Seven]

Yes, and a good one too, using the advanced Dual Contouring algorithm for meshing. And there are also adaptive detail meshing options.

[Aox8ha]

Can you show please examples for mesh to SDF? Instead of using the built in chisel primitives? Interested in how it converts the original mesh to sdfs… Thank you!!!

[Metin_Seven]

Oops, my apologies, I had read your question the other way round. I read “SDF to mesh”. There’s no mesh to SDF conversion (yet). That’s a different ballgame.

[VaultPack (Oğuzhan İçer)]

Looks so promising!

[Metin_Seven]

A 3D Metal Moon Child, based upon my old game character. Made while beta-testing the latest Chisel version.

This is a screenshot of Chisel’s ray-marching viewport renderer. I’ll make a nice ray-traced rendering next.

[HailSanta]

What a brilliant tool! Superb work.

I genuinely hate to be that guy, but there are a few QOL features that would really help (you’ve already murdered Substance Modeler with what you got, but if we’re asking for unicorns ):

• If a skew and taper modifier are in the cards along with a bend modifier with an adjustable center that would be incredible. And an 8-point FFD lattice would be even better
• Likewise, it’d be great to either control where bevels appear on the cube in the same way that Boxcutter (and also Substance Modeler) provides for. The ability to make square ‘capsules’ is very useful. Ditto WRT trapezoids. The ability to draw shapes of non-uniform dimensions without scaling (and then applying the scale) would be great. In particular, like boxcutter, I often find myself needing to make an angled cut with a box. The ability to draw that in the viewport at an arbitrary angle would be huge (the same point-drag and drag-from-line operations in boxcutter, in other words).
• Just generally, a few more hard ops-like shortkeys would be welcome. I find myself trying to call and control arrays using hops controls and that’s something I really miss.
• A somewhat more pie-in-the-sky (and likely much less straightforward) request would be the ability to convert a mesh to an FFD. While other tools that do this just use geonodes, I imagine this is a much heavier lift in the custom renderer. But if it isn’t, it’d be a huge deal for certain special cases even if it was performance-intensive.
• Similarly, I don’t know if polygonal pipe objects (and especially squares) are practical, but if they are, this would be a hugely useful addition.

For what it’s worth, the biggest problem cases I’ve had include objects like hand grips and stocks on a weapon model. Because it’s hard to control the skew of objects like this while keeping a uniform rounded profile, the ability to just taper/skew/8-point FFD objects like this would enable a lot more models without extensive chopping to get there manually and then more chopping to round everything again by tweaking the tension.

Thanks for bearing with me! The product as it is is still excellent.

[obsurveyor]

Just picked this up the other day and have been playing with it. Seems pretty intuitive and really fast.

One bug I’ve noticed is that when you undo something in the Chisel tool, it undoes twice. For example, if you select your two objects(click, then shift-click target) for a boolean operation, run a bool and then undo, it undoes the boolean operation and also the shift-click target selection. This is on Blender 5.2.0 LTS with Chisel 3.0 from Superhive.

It’d be nice with a more powerful Mirror operation too. One where you can use a modifier to create an empty at the cursor and mirror around it. Also would be nice if the value was shown when using the gizmos for adjusting the various blends.