I think adding nurbs to blender would be eventually going the same route as sculpting… You give people a couple of tools to pull points around, and eventually you have a thread with 10,000 replies about what tools aren’t there, why they can’t make a fillet blend with a surface, etc etc etc … I can already see the “why does plasticity have this and blender doesn’t” posts…
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That is what we have got now.
If that was ever an issue, there would be no Blender at this point. That’s fine. It’s just how feedback works. Vast majority of it means nothing. I think there is no single dev who doesn’t know that.
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I think main problem here is that when people see NURBS they don’t think of Plasticity, which indeed is popular, but they think of old workflows and forgotten software like Rhino 3D. Plasticity markets itself as “CAD for Artists” but they don’t use the name NURBS much, if at all.
The problem in general with these surveys is that they are very sensitive to wording. If NURBS term was replaced with something along the lines “modeling like Plasticity 3D”, even though it means the same thing internally, it could possibly get ten times as much votes.
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I don’t believe Rhino is forgotten by anyone in CAD. It’s one of the most powerful and mature software of its kind. It’s just expensive and since it’s so full of functionality it’s quite difficult to learn from what I hear. As far as I know Rhino is CAD God - have some respect.
Edit: Maybe not that expensive actually, just checked the prices…
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If you want much of Rhino’s functionality in an easy to use CAD package for a reasonable price, look no further than MoI 3D.
Written by the main developer of Rhino to be particularly artist friendly, it is a wonderful program. And it plays well with Blender.
I’ve used it for years for my hard surface modeling needs. And it has one of the friendliest and best managed support BBs around. The minimalist interface is not much to look at, but it is very powerful and well thought out.
Only $295 USD.
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I used MoI 3D quite a bit in it’s early days. I really quite liked it.
Ideally Blender would combine poly and solid modeling (I don’t know of anyone else that does that successfully) and that would be incredible. However it is no small undertaking and most other systems pay for a solids kernel (including MoI) which Blender probably can’t do.
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I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding of terms here. NURBS are curves and are often used to create surfaces and not always solids. Plasticity looks like a solid modeler. Solids are not the same although they may well use NURBS curves to create solids the result is a solid model. Surfaces are NOT solid models (take a look a Alias as an example of a NURBS surface modeler).
The main difference is surfaces have no volume. Solids have huge advantages is some ways but most solid modelers aren’t great curved surface modelers.
There is also major differences in so called solid modelers. Systems like Solidworks and Inventor use solid modeling but also support assemblies (and a host of other CAD related things). Systems like Plasticity and MoI do not support assemblies (as far as I know) so there is a big difference in what you can do and what it’s good at.
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I have nothing against NURBS modelling per se. But I’m very surprised to see request for this in Blender. I have huge doubts it can become a project at Bledner Foundation. I don’t see it’s as a strategic win long term but a resources sink.
There are so much more attractive projects that BF can focus on to bring real value to Blender like properly focusing on sculpting, making Blender fully color managed with OCIO support, make Cycles spectral, refactor how animation works, invest into full USD support, texturing and of course keep working on geo nodes and tools with more focus on physics and dynamics.
Making full featured NURBS toolset in Blender doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a huge undertaking and would probably take years to make it really good to use. Besides, there is already an amazing tool like Plasticity. Before Blender get its NURBS toolset Plasticity will be firmly established as a go to tool for NURBS modelling.
I’d really like to see the final results of the survey. I will be really surprised if there is a demand for it from Blender users.
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What they have done so far (correct me if i’m wrong) is mainly simulation zones and hair both of which are “simulations”, i’m talking about actual physics interraction between the different domains.
- a piece of cloth floating on top of water surface
- a light object drifting away with the current
- a rock slowling falling down the bottom of a river
- two differently colored liquids mixing together into a 3rd color
- a proper fracturing system where you select object property (wood, rock, etc…) and it will pick from a list of built in profiles to match that, dynamically fracturing the object based on collision area (not manually set up from the beginning). And the list goes on…
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Since the subject is being discussed I’m genuinely curious about why folks like Plasticity. If one wanted CAD tools why not just use CAD? I get that Plasticity is a less rigid workflow, but that rigidity is part of the benefit of CAD.
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This kind of feature request platform would need to be tightly linked to the development fund in my view. Otherwise, it would compete against it in a very unhealthy way.
Something in the direction of, you get a certain amount of votes, proportional to the amount of money you are giving.
And even more important, you can only fund specific features, if you are a dev fund member already. I am sure that would be unpopular, but in my view more than justified.
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Just in theory. In practice, you still need an actual physics engine, with proper optimizations (which are not possible with geometry nodes). There is an experiment using the Jolt engine (initially started with Bullet) for now and that’s about it.
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The appeal of Plasticity is it’s UX is similar to Blender, you can say it borrows from Blender UX, so you feel right at home as a Blender user. CAD workflow is a completely different beast, which isn’t a bad thing but if you were a Blender user and wanted to start learning NURBS and solid modeling for games or VFX, Plasticity makes more since from a UX viewpoint and Plasticity has a addon bridge to Blender :D. Plasticity started as a solid modeler, but it is getting more surface tools recently with the inclusion of XNurbs and other features.
As much as I love NURBS or SDF modeling, I have to agree that a focus on better animation, sculpting, painting and simulation(cloth, muscle, fluid, etc.) would be the best use of time/money.
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The main devfund platform could collect a % on the funding 
Makes sense. Appreciate the reply.
I agree. If resources were unlimited I’d say it would be great to have but they are limited and there are many other modelers out there that work well. It would be hard to justify.
Modeling with NURBS can be super frustrating, even with a good system and it takes time to become good with it. I just have the feeling that if Blender had those tools they wouldn’t get used much. One of the reasons Subdivision surfaces were developed was to make this sort of modeling easier. It doesn’t solve everything but it is way more intuitive.
Unless perhaps the BF just happens to have a super expert NURBS developer sitting around wondering what to do…
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I always mix them up. (nurbs/solid modeling)
Now you mention it I remember that was one of the reasons my interest went from solids and nurbs to mesh modeling in the first place.
Personally I will not vote on this survey, out of the options given I would probably say all of the above (and more). So I will let others vote and go with the flow.
If what you are doing is a still image, then yeah, its fine. If what you want is animation/simulation, then no, it’s not even close. Mind you, the current particle hair isn’t either.
They are aware of it, https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/125700 and there is even a planned workshop at BCon for Hair Dynamics.
Yeah, but subscription based, etc, etc.
We should and while yes it is now part of Geometry Nodes as a whole, it is still somewhat it’s own thing, even outside of the general simulation node that is already there (but way more geared towards motion graphics).
So it’s less of a case that it was just forgotten and more of a case that like everything else development related, actual time and a firm commitment to work on hair/cloth simulation needs to be made, starting with an actual design document.
At this stage I’m not aware of any such thing happening (in theory that workshop will be the start) and hence just lumping it all in a single survey category selection of ‘Geometry Nodes’ I feel would mean it just gets lost and not done.
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I think we are asking Blender to be or to have all the tools and features other 3D software have. I understand the price struggle with other software but I think Blender is unique and has some unique features and it offers a decent amount of photo-realistic tools (modeling, sculpting, texturing)
I would actually love to see Blender going towards a more artistic approach. To focus on its unique features instead of replicating what others can do.
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