In the recent years, I have been exploring all surfacing software and my conclusion frightened me : I am on my way to become an industrial designer and the tool I am supposed to use all day are terrible. Either too expensive and the companies I work for cannot afford them. Either stuck in the 90’s, doing only the strict necessary to keep you locked into their ecosystem, often both.
Those CAD software are only made to cleanup what you imagined before. They are not preserving the creative flow, nor taking full advantage of the 3rd dimension.
Approach
Now what ? Make once again a new software from scratch ? Plasticity is doing it, good luck to them, it looks great. But is their market large enough to develop a full Rhino competitor ?
Anyway I am personally not a developer. I can just code like a beginner.
And that’s when Geometry nodes took to the stage !
A new way to code without code, very fast, should not be too hard to maintain in the long run, benefits from all aspects of the polished UX of Blender… It also interacts well with Python. Python which amazingly happens to have OpenCASCADE geometric kernel as a module, so it can export .STEP !
Your feedback is precious.
Scroll bellow to catch up with development !
Best luck to you! These tools are so needed.
Are you aware of export to igs add-on from Rajeev Nair? Very robust, somewhat similar to part of scope of your project.
Here is a first version !
There is a bug when uninstalling tho, so you need to go in your appdata and delete the addon manually for now. The beta is for nerds only so that’s okay for now.
/!\ Windows only (for now)
/!\ Combs and portion continuity doesn’t work in Blender 3.6
Also there is no tutorial or doc for now so good luck. However this is usable !
Proof :
Pretty funny to use Blender for that (which imo, is not known for good UX).
Anyway, I’ve been an industrial designer for a decade now, started using Solidworks in 2006… thankfully stopped using it in 2008 and began using Alias instead… and in the last couple of years, I’ve mostly worked in Rhino and NX.
In recent years, I’ve actually used Blender for subdivision modeling and imported it both into NX and Catia, since they both also have those features (Rhino too, and it works quite well as long as you don’t use weights) so the worlds are definitely getting closer!
This would be interesting to try, but when I did, I got the following error message:
I agree good UX is a bit subjective, for me Blender is far from perfect but I absolutely fell in love with the feeling of fluidity and control. Last time I tried Alias, one menu was stuck under another one… and the xyz for mouse clics didn’t felt like something I can get comfortable with quickly. All those software feel like they were made before 3D video games imposed some standards.
And thanks for the report, the beta is made for that
You have to enable the Xform tool, and then you can hit space and what pops up is one of the most effective UIs ever designed! You can literally do 90% of your designing using that single menu and it’s a remarkable study in efficiency which I haven’t seen replicated anywhere else.
I don’t really know how to have access to Alias now that my trial period is over x), but I would love to try ! To be honest I looked at a lot of Alias videos before starting the project.
And before you see by yourself : no the addon doesn’t have an amazing UX for now x). The main “new” things it brings for now is seeing the surface updating in real time and see all the connected surfaces follow
Oh sorry, I didn’t specified there is no mac version yet. I kind of don’t know how to compile Python OCCT for mac with a PC, but if you or anyone is willing to help that would be great. I will investigate soon anyway.
Fair enough. If you manage to do a Mac version, I’d be very interested to try it. If not, I guess it would be helpful to fail gracefully, but I realize you’re at a very early stage of development. Looks amazing so far!
