SurfacePsycho Addon Project

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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Hi,
I am developing a new addon for surfacing with precision inside Blender

Alpha version available on gumroad >>> here <<<

Goals

  • Make surface design accessible and pleasant

  • Make it a tool for actual product creation and not just to copy what you drawn

  • Make the bridge from Blender to CAD with the .STEP format

Surface Psycho simply explained
Surface Psycho simply explained1517Ă—843 99.7 KB

Context

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 with great algorithms and capabilities but very poor UX. Not made for creatives, but are made for the companies. Or cheaper but behind in terms of capabilities, so poor UX too.
If you want to create a car or a boat, return to paper, they cannot help. Those CAD software are only made to trace on top of what you drew (or sculpted with clay). They are not taking into their advantage the magic third dimension ! (If you happen to be in the field and disagree at this point, reach to me I’m curious).

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 happen to have an the OpenCASCADE geometric kernel as a module, so it can export .STEP !

The first set of tools I am making are relying heavily on bicubic Bezier patches. They are built from mesh objects using the mesh as their control polygon. Currently I am able to connect them with certain degrees of continuity, sculpt them, snap them to curves, mirroring them and more… all updating in real time. Also the conversion back and forth with Blender internal NURBS system is planned.

Demo Blender side
Demo Blender side1483Ă—897 160 KB

Demo SolidWorks side
Demo SolidWorks side1477Ă—1017 190 KB

I will put some videos below to showcase all that as soon as I can.

I aim to publish a first version before Christmas and maybe an Alpha sooner depending on the interest.

Your feedback is precious

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Link to the first mini video about the trim/extend parallel feature
https://x.com/Romain_guimbal/status/1695391452107362477?s=20

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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.

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Yes of course ! It saved me so much in my latest internship :ok_hand:

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I just added linear sweeps !
(or “ruled surfaces”)

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Beta release next week ? It’s going very well so far :smiley:
This week I added a lot, but my favorite feature is “connect to portion”


It is essential, but it also exceeded my expectations. You can basically bind surfaces to anywhere on another !

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Surface combs are done ! Beta release tonight hopefully

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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 :

Capture d’écran 2023-11-10 162521
Capture d’écran 2023-11-10 1625211480×811 66.4 KB

Ask me anything if you struggle by the way

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Wow that is a great work around Nurbs and surfaces in Blender!
Bravo!
I will spread it everywhere! :smirk: :heart_eyes:

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Pretty funny to use Blender for that (which imo, is not known for good UX). :rofl:

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:

image
image946Ă—193 31.5 KB

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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 :sweat_smile:

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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.

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I updated the file, does it work now ? (I I’m don’t have the issue so I’m not sure)

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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

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When I try to enable it, I get this (I/m on a Mac, in case there’s something platform-specific in the addon)

image
image1994Ă—1184 294 KB

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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.

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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!

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Yeah very early stage indeed. Thanks a lot, I hope I would promote it enough for you to see when a Mac version is released

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It works, but I think there’s an issue with the Nurbs surface calculations…

EDIT: Oh, wait… I’m not allowed to change the degree of the surface myself using blender’s built-in subdivision? :sweat_smile:

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Its works with Linux?