Finally made something in MagicaCSG again. I had almost forgotten how blissful it is to create something with that gem of an editor and renderer. ![]()
WIPs:
Video impression:
Finally made something in MagicaCSG again. I had almost forgotten how blissful it is to create something with that gem of an editor and renderer. ![]()
WIPs:
Video impression:
Very cool shapes. ![]()
Enjoy it while you can you MAC traitor!! ![]()
Muchas gracias amigo! ![]()
Hahaha, you bastard! ![]()
Let me tell you: since Apple paid $ 1 million to that blonde-haired nitwit in the US, my motivation to return to Apple has diminished again. There’s no good versus evil in Big Tech. They’re all similar. ![]()
So, given the added fact that I would dearly miss MagicaCSG, I might very well search for the most silent 4090 GPU instead of spending my savings on the piece of fruit. I hope the 4090 will become more affordable now that the 5090 has arrived. ![]()
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Did you try that MSI curve trick from the other thread? I set it up and GPU has been silent since. Worked well.
Judging by reviews and benchmarks the 5090 might be a generation worth skipping. And the lower 50xx cards are apparently a big drop down from the 90.
I’m going to hang on to the 3090 for another few years yet.
Yes, my 3090 is definitely more silent now, and doesn’t start blowing as fast as before.
I might as well wait some more, unless a silent 4090 Ti model becomes pretty affordable soon.
Made a Cycles re-rendering of my MagicaCSG robot bust.
Some nice new stuff has been added to the latest MagicaCSG version in the Prototype tier over at Patreon:
guys, maybe it’s insanely off topic, but i remember there was some developments for SDF support in geometry nodes. any info on what happened to it? is it still being developed?
This must be the most fully-featured non-destructive prim tool out there now? It seems to have more tools (by a long shot) than any other.
Absolutely. Ephtracy is pushing SDF live-prim boundaries. ![]()
Not off-topic at all. ![]()
There’s basic SDF support in Geo Nodes. The free SDF Prototyper add-on and the commercial Blob Fusion add-on make use of that functionality.
The current SDF implementation in Geo Nodes live-converts the SDF math into geometry via a grid method like OpenVDB, so things can quickly slow down once they get a bit more detailed.
Ideally, a new initiative would add a ray-marching renderer to Blender, so SDF volumes would not need to be meshed, as in MagicaCSG, and as in the ConjureSDF Blender add-on.
Didn’t you mention that last year MCSG might get the other SDF surfacing method toolset? Non-destructive prims are cool, but they are so slow to work with compared to destructive boolean voxels. Not just slow computationally, but slow workflow-wise too.
Ephtracy once mentioned over at Patreon that he’s devised a method to add SDF sculpting functionality to MagicaCSG. I don’t know how he has that in mind, and if it is still on the roadmap.
In MagicaCSG, live-primitives are handled with noticeable less computational load than in Modeler, which is very convenient. Apart from that, to my personal experience, up to a certain detail level, live-prims are not slower to work with than sculpting. When you’re sculpting, you’re constantly adjusting surfaces, shapes, crevices, placing strokes, undoing, placing them again, et cetera. Next to that you need to add elements by creating, merging, smoothing and deforming primitives.
But that’s my personal experience. I’ve made around 100 MagicaCSG scenes so far, and with each project I need a little less time to know which prims to choose and which Boolean operations and blend types to use to get a certain shape. Once you start adding details, the difference between sculpting and working with live-prims becomes smaller. I guess for secondary detail level stuff, sculpting and live-prim modeling will take similar time, and live-prims are not really suitable for the tertiary detail level, although I hope MagicaCSG will one day add procedural SDF texturing.
If you’d ask me what I like most about SDF live-prims, it would be the non-destructivity. It allows you to freely experiment, change decisions at any stage, and often you encounter “happy accidents” along the way, for example by changing the order of the prims, a Boolean type or a blend mode.
I’m not talking about sculpting specifically, so much as destructive voxel prim workflow. Live-prims are a nice extra tool to have, but they are limited in the shapes they can create and the more rigid nature of the workflow is slower, plus it’s not suited to large projects with 1000s of layers.
Yes, it is great for experimenting. In that recent sci-fi hallway project I did it was all live-prims because I was repurposing parts and it worked out great, but this was a specific use case and the shapes were all boxy and simple.
But I would never use the live-prims for something like the Ducati bike I did. That was all destructive prims. It would have taken 10x longer to do something like that in live-prims.
So, yes, live-prims are great for certain projects, but imo they are limited in what they can create and the workflow is slower the more complex the project becomes.
I still think you should take a deep dive into MagicaCSG. The latest versions are very powerful, and you can have hundreds of shapes in a scene without any slowdown, even without blowing GPU fans. ![]()
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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫
Modeled and rendered in MagicaCSG.
Slightly post-processed in PhotoScape X (Pro).
Inspired by a Denis Spichkin sketch.
WIPs:
Video, dedicated to my Mastodon followers who recognized buttocks in his chin (wait until the end)… ![]()
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Found a bug in MagicaCSG… ![]()
Bugs are rare in MCSG, and I can’t even recall a crash in the years I’ve been working with it.
─ Edit: Even this turned out to not really be a bug, more of a less useful SDF method for coloring areas. It has now been fixed.
Anyone take a look at Ditto ?
“Ditto is a Addon that blend custom objects together with Projection, and Smoothing in a SDF like way via Voxels”