Official Blender User Survey

This doesn’t seem to have been posted yet and given how potentially important it could turn out to be, the more participants the better.

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Please wish for a robust SDF modeling toolset in our beloved Blender, guys! Blender should not stay behind in that emerging area. :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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I really want NURBS tooling more but i did pick SDF toolset in the 3 chooses :slight_smile:

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Why so? What do you want to do with NURBS? (I am not trying to convey any opinion by that question, I am genuinely curious to know about your perspective)

if you tried plasticity you would know :wink:
thats the kind of nurbs people want. very artist friendly :v:

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I personally would like blender devs to start working on physics improvments, they have been neglected for quite some time now (last physics feature update is more then 3 years old “Blender 2.92 02/25/2021”).

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Arent physics covered in geometry node now? you can create custom physic engines

I have tried Plasticity. It’s awesome. It’s just that there are practically no tools for working with NURBS in Blender at the moment so it doesn’t seem like it’s very plausible to expect improvement of such level any time soon even if they worked on it with that intention. It would probably take years… Hopefully, I am wrong.

SDF seems like the more likely solution for such kind of modelling capabilities to me, plus it has all the excitement around it being a hot new thing so maybe all that energy might help with development. It might also be better than NURBS modelling in some ways. Although at the moment it seems to me the idea is for it to be Geometry nodes thing, which is probably great and everything, but I think in the short term usability of it might suffer because SDF might probably benefit more from interactive tools and UI designed for working with it specifically and Geometry Nodes route might be slower with that while carefully making sure it’s compatible with all general principles of how stuff works in Blender, which is of course amazing in the long term so I am not complaining, just think out loud. Again, hopefully these gut feelings of mine might be wrong and if they choose to go more into that direction, the development is fast and we get to enjoy it sooner.

Well… to be fair we are probably talking about years in any case. It just feels like SDF is a bit more promising.

5 Likes

yea, but bf added the nurbs option in the list, so i guess they believe they can do something with it

Seems they’d like to mainly know how to have more funding, it would be great in my opinion to have some sort of “feature-request crowdfunding platform”. It would lead to a more decentralized and democratic development process where the users directly pay for what they need :slight_smile:

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Day they do this is the day Blender turns into generative image AI by popular request.

1 Like

Don’t get me wrong, it would only be logical to add at least some functionality for NURBS. At the moment I even wonder why even have them in this state… Even the most basic functionality regarding NURBS that was there almost 20 years ago in Maya(last time I used it) is absent in Blender today. Well… to be honest personally I don’t see much problem with it and don’t miss it too much since poly modelling is more than enough for me and I love it in Blender, but it’s just a bit weird… …if it comes to dedicating resources to SDF or NURBS though, I think my personal wish would be SDF.

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me too, it seems like a more modern tech, even though i havent played too much with it yet.
also i heard that sdf requires powerful gpus to get decent performance. :thinking: not sure how true is that. maybe thats one of the reasons some would still prefer nurbs. i dont know

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I said the same thing, production level quality Hair and Cloth simulation.

Of course that had to be added as an ‘Other’, since it wasn’t a drop down list option… so that’s not a good sign :frowning:

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I have only really used Geometry Nodes for hair/fur a few times so I don’t know much about it, but it really surprised me how easy it is to work with and just how well it works in general. Is currently available functionality for hair not “production level quality” It seems it’s really good. What’s wrong with hair in Blender?

I also think since Geometry Nodes is definitely something that will be developed further no matter any survey, it is likely to be improving further anyway…

Cloth… well, it’s hard to beat Marvelous Designer for cloth anyway… At least the way I see it. But I am optimistic it will at least get better no matter what. It would be nice to always stay in Blender. I don’t think it’s possible the devs just forget about cloth with Geometry Nodes.

I think we should see hair as well as cloth simulation improvements anyway… Am I wrong?

But, Plasticity is using Parasolid for their foundation. They didn’t have to start from nothing, and Blender wouldn’t be able to go the same route.

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in fact, there is a guy doing it but as yet another addon of course SurfacePsycho Addon Project - Coding / Released Scripts and Themes - Blender Artists Community

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Of course there is a guy… :smiley: :smiley: That’s really cool. But it’s still weird that Blender supports NURBS as geometry type but has no meaningful native tools to use it. I mean I wouldn’t care if there were no NURBS in Blender at all if you ask me, but since they are there… There might as well be some decent functionality to manipulate them… Nope. Nothing at all. Not even NURBS menu with a single meaningful function. Well, I suppose they are useful as a curve type. Not sure what the surfaces are for. What can you do with them? :smiley:

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Booleans, bevel…procedural solid modeling (autocad)

ikr, yeah its lame. i mostly just touch the bezier curves rather than nurbs curves and the basic nurbs surfaces are sometimes useful if don’t wanna use subdiv modelling for basic shapes but without really not much advanced topology or blending. that’s why i also bought a plasticity license hoping to get into the cad modelling but nurbs surfacing specially…