Groboto 3 is on sale right now with a special discount code. It exports very clean obj files that can be used in Blender - very nice for previz, and base meshes for sculpting.
From MacLife’s review:
"GroBoto does not pretend to be a full-featured 3D modeling, rendering, and animation application. It’s more of an interactive art and graphic experimentation tool designed to provide near-instant gratification, and to create wild 3D shapes and movies that would involve considerable effort in any standard 3D app. To that end, it’s absolutely successful and provides an endless range of truly unique visuals.
What would be really sweet would be if Groboto exported the entire animated bot as an FBX or Collada file that Blender could read. So we could get the complete Groboto animation inside of Blender.
From the Lightwave forum. You can still get Groboto for 50% off, if you like.
I love this explanation of the why and how of Groboto’s ‘booleans on steroids’ approach:
Hello Lightwave people,
I feel bad that I didn’t get a heads-up posted here for our recent sale (thanks Jeffry SG, for trying). Good news is…
We’re joining the Cyber Monday webWagon - & extending it to Tuesday too - 50% off GroBoto w/this code: GU6343TY http://www.groboto.com/v3/Store
—so why should you care? – Do you have a use for GroBoto?..
GroBoto is in many ways nothing like any 3D app you have used. The best thing you can do going in is forget everything you know & have experienced in 3D Boolean Modeling.
'Tho similar to Booleans – we call GroBoto’s integrated modeling system metaSolid Modeling. It consists of realtime WYSIWYG composing & trimming of true solid geometry and automated generation of clan seamNet Meshes. Those seamNet meshes are formed from native row&column quadric primitive quad meshes and all-quad edge-loops (our ‘seams’).
GroBoto is not a Sculpting app ('tho pushing Boolean objects around in real-time & carving out new forms can feel a bit like sculpting).
There are limits. GroBoto’s internal metaSolid primitive & boolean modeling system is proprietary and non-polygonal. You won’t be able to import any mesh models into GroBoto (except perhaps - in the future - for reference).
I’ve started to use Groboto on a kids book project I’m working on, creating little robots in Groboto and then bringing them into Blender for texturing/additions and rendering. The process is extremely intuitive, once you get to working on it and the meshes and unwrap are really nice. I’ve come up against a few small problems, these are mostly to do with figuring out the best workflow for me and probably not RTFM properly.
I had Groboto in V2, but didn’t really have a use for it then. V3 came along at just the right time and I’ve been having a blast with it.