I’m starting a new thread to showcase what I’ve been working on over the past few months from researching what SDFs are to exploring their uses and everything in between. I’ve been using Blender for three years now, mostly focusing on hard surface modeling like guns and other assets. I’ve been wanting a tool that’s flexible and goes beyond topology, which is why SDFs are perfect.
The current plugin has:
custom Raymarch render engine
custom depth and grid render system
custom outline and cursor picking
panel to control SDF blending
SDF hierarchy with Groups and order of operation
SDF to mesh
isometric view
currently supports rendering of triangles
There are a lot of feature I want to, feature I’ve never seen in any other program such as:
curved planed sdf for precision modelling
sdf modifiers
sdf presets (treat a group of sdf as single, reusable, blend subtract the whole group as one)
instant conversion mesh to sdf (not voxel but for raymarch)
Ray traced render of SDF directly from camera (F12)
and many more…
THE ADDON WORKS FROM BLENDER 3.3+ TO 5.0 (TESTED) WORKS BOTH VULKAN AND OPENGL
I do not posses a macos device, so everyone interested to be a tester please contact me at. alexandrujardan@icloud.com
You’ll receive a final discount when the add-on is released, and your name will also be announced among the final contributors of the build.
Hi again. It’s about discount= pricing. Could you showcase videos when you use it. Because we need as artists to see if your addon could benefit the whole blender community, as features you describe must be seen before it worth the price to donate or pay something. The amount of features does not guarantee the usability, as you probably know already. A lot of exising addons already does the job, and free SDF apps too, some are better than others. It’s not fair if some beta-testers have it free and some not, as it happened sometimes, so…we want answers, please…and thanks for your interest of being useful to blender users, as it evolves fast, as some addon makers also lost some time developping addons that doesn’t work anymore in the latest and future versions.
Hey Dan, I understand about the videos I’m planning to make a YouTube playlist for documentation once I finish adding all the features I want, so everything will be listed there. You’re also right about features and usability; my goal is to make my addon feel like an integrated part of Blender, where SDF modeling feels natural and intuitive. Beta testers will only receive a pre-alpha version for testing, along with a discount for a way saying thank you. I’m also aiming for long-term support for this addon. I know about Conjure and had some new updates, but after more than a year of almost nothing I decided to make my addo, some updates were posted while I was developing the addon. Conjure’s current pricing is $40 for alpha, $60 for beta, and $80 for version 1.0. Personally, I’d never spend $80 on a Blender addon, so I’ll price mine at $20 for the whole thing, with optional donations. The release date should be set for mid-to-late January 2026.
80$ price point is a very high barrier, yet 20$ seems too low, I mean, such project seems complex enough to require many hours of maintenance, if the result would be a net profit of 1$ x hour it could jeopardize his future. Consider that a proper SDF Raymarch inside Blender would be a must-buy for many users that wont regret to spend 35€ for an useful addon, even less regret if such price point could guarantee updates for new blender versions in the next years. Unless you dont care about that aspect and even decide to release it on github at some point nonetheless, but there’s not many coders that have spare time to maintan a huge code for free.
interesting but how is this addon comparable with for example ConjureSDF? considering also that addon will cost more than 40, 60, 80$ or so when released the next version
20 is a good strategic price point. not too high to start thinking about delaying a purchase.
At that price point, it helps introducing more people into the world of SDF, snagging up the undecided as well as those which are not happy with the other SDF Blender addons.
SDFModeller can be had for a pay what you want price point so that’s imo the competition you need to compete with.
using SDF inside Blender is convenience and 20$ sounds fair.
Thank you for clarifying these questions for all of us. This facilitates the atmosphere of the debate. Long term support could also give you the opportunity to engage more the blender devs in the process of making a better Blender in the future. And should help you live of the work you put in it meanwhile. Thanks again man… Oh, and if this becomes free one day, let us know. We’ll stay in touch
I’m using conjureSDF because it’s the next available option after mine. I’m offering $20 for one year of support and updates.
The price will not change 20 for the full version with direct support and 1 year updates.
Well I try to put myself in someone else shoes, 20$ is what someone make in 2h of work generally and for some people is a lot of money, I also want people when thinking about SDF in Blender to think about my addon and for that it needs to be available and cheap.
I got finally to work mesh to sdf, it bakes down the mesh into a volume texture and use that texture for the raymarch, also works when converting it back to a mesh.
The pluggin has reached now about 10.000 lines of code
Yes, I’ve been using Anthropic models, is great at analyzing and debugging code, but all the logic and code is mostly mine, is just a tool to work faster.
Anthropic’s Claude, like all LLMs, struggles with brevity. I bet you could cut your codebase by 50% without losing any functionality in an afternoon of refactoring. 10,000 lines is WAY too many for the scope of function you currently have
You are right, probably I can cut many lines of code since I’m not really focusing on optimization right now but features, but what the addon does requires a lot of code, only meshing is 2000 lines of code, engine alone is another 2200 lines of code, the other are panels, operators, shaders, gizmos, etc… maybe for an update I could optimize everything and reduce size.
UPDATES: I’m working on a flexible way to use SDF with SDF modifiers that adjust the look of the SDF similar to Blender modifiers, with an order of operations that can be rearranged. The big challenge is optimizing SDF to handle hundreds of them efficiently. I’m trying to implement a BVH structure with sphere tracing, over-relaxation, and bounding boxes to skip calculations, but even then it still struggles to handle a large amount of sdfs.
While working on the engine, I realized I was mapping the matcap incorrectly, so I examined Blender’s source code and implemented their approach. I also noticed they render specular highlights on top of the matcap, which led me to dive deeper into how Blender handles it. After exploring the GitHub shaders, I discovered they load EXR matcaps using OpenEXR, which contains multiple layer, one for base color and another for specular. I integrated OpenEXR into the project and was amazed at how stunning it looked with blending and chamfers!! WITH SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS:
