SDF Modeler

Hi Sascha!

the tool now is really strong at creature sculpting, but for hardsurface design I think there is still a last puzzle piece,the sub group or nest boolean group whatever call it.something like below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B5g8dKBeHg

is it possible to implement this in the future ? 

Hi Sascha.

Dan again 😉. Im using now a lot SDF Modeler now in conjunction to blender and found an easy way to texture more details with pictures and stencil painting above existing vertex colors, and as color attributes can now be preserved after voxel remeshing or quadriflow remeshing within blender itself, things gets more and more interesting now. I would like to express my gratitude for that.  

The only little very small limitation i should say is snapping rotations at increments of for instance 5 degrees to get perfect ortho orientations quickly. Instead of having to rotate on an axis, guessing the right acting axis, then entering...90, 45, 60, etc... afterwards in the corresponding column. In addition to the actual very appreciated reset rotation feature, that should be something huge for the user.

Thanks a lot Sascha for great works.

Have a nice day. Yours sincerely Dan.

I love it! This is the tool that I really needed for doing 3D solo game jams!

Have you considered open-sourcing it? Or maybe would you like to have some help?

very nice and simple to use out of all SDF  modelers i tried this is fav. One thing i have to complain but really more of a observation actually is that when you grope shapes and if you want to scale the group in only one axes you can't. 

hi! im amazed by the simplicity and perfection from this program, i wonder if there is any chance, one day, you make a "blender like" keys to press G to move the object, then press X or Y or Z to move and snap in the axis

Hi Sascha. I saw some requests about exporting formats, a big number of comments about classical triangulation export ones. But I was thinking... what about render image formats ? As I understand SDF Modeler is more about shaders isn't it ? As 3d in this case involves depth in some case I suppose, could  rendered image keep some information in a kind of "pass" maybe in a format that keeps it like HDR or more open one like EXR. I tried some apps using depth in relation with transforming 2d to 3d or mixing depths of 2 images in a 3d render even beeing polygonised afterwards... Are you planning to develop to render separeted "passes" in the future ? Or will you take another direction ? 

Thanks for your good (excellent should I say) job. Have a nice day.

Yours, Dan

App works great on OSX, so many thanks for that. Downloaded it and gave it a go without any instructions - made some decent progress for a first try. Great job, this could easily be a commercial app come v1.0.

Hi  Sasha.

Well, I've been testing the latest version this morning and wow! New amazing bridge feature and lot of good stuff going on. Such as spline tension, etc... And happily surprise to see a little ,  simple but so useful qol improvement : resetting the original position rotation and scale by the means of a button. So cool, thanks a lot ! Very fond of all that, good continuation !

Have a good day. Sincerely Dan.🤯👍

are there keyboard shortcuts? I can't find any if there are, and if there aren't, just adding a few would make this so much easier to use, especially if they are mappable. I keep pressing "g" when I want to move an object, lol. Great piece of software though! super excited to see how you develop it further!

hey, just saw this tool and it looks awesome. i downloaded it for a M3 mac with Sonoma. i cant seem to open the application "You can’t use this version of the application “SDFModeler” with this version of macOS.". Unless i go into the package contents and open it from there. Any tips?

a couple of things i made within the first couple of hours of using this amazing program.

i absolutely love the way sdf modeling works. it feels so natural and controllable, i believe this paired with some sort of automatic retopology technique, maybe ai? could be the future of 3d modeling!

What a fantastic piece of software! Loving it. One problem I seem to have with it is that I cant use my taskbar anymore when using it - need to do alt+TAB to switch between apps. I do use Start11 which is changing my taskbar but never had this happening with any other software so... MAYBE a bug? Either way I am having lots of fun. Let me just repeat what others said already - it would be cool to see some additional export file type options because PLY for now I can only open in Nomad :D So sure it would be appreciated. But you do you - as a creator of such wonderful app I am sure you have many more better ideas what to do :D Looking forward to further versions - I think you are really onto something here!

is there a community like discord for this tool? i would love to join people working using this!

made this with sdfModeler first try:

It would be very useful if you could “invert” field (i.e. where there’s no volume now there is and where there was volume, there’s void). Would make creating tricky geometry easier.

Hi, I'm the one who commented that I couldn't copy, paste or cut between the hierarchy tree and layers, well, dunno why, but now it works. Magic! ;)
Thanks a lot for your patience and your superb app and of course for a Mac Version :)

Could you add “regular mesh” export, like OBJ, STL, GLTF or FBX? That is, unless it’s there and just wasn’t mentioned in the description.

Would be useful if one wanted to use it to create stuff for 3D printing or games/3d animations.

Just saw on Youtube, looks Great!! There's only one thing to ask, is there a setting to toggle the rounded edges(bevel) profile of a primitive to zero(off)?, I am asking from the point of view of making low poly after achieving a shape.

Hi all. This is a test after a week of using SDF Modeler in one hour... 

Could have been much longer using other software...

Great tool!

 I tried to model a stylized plank for testing purposes. The only feature I currently miss is spline profiles (I want the bottom of the wood grain line created by the spline to become sharp).

 Thank you for your work!

Dude! This is so cool! I'm a professional 3d artist and this makes modeling fun! not for production sure, but as a concepting tool it's really cool. The only small issue I had is that the model came to blender with flipped normals for some reason but whatever. 

Hi Sascha! Great tool! I saw it on AskNK on YouTube and turned my son onto it, but am also having a blast with it (I mainly use Blender). I do have a question, which may sound stupid, but is SDF Modeler free to use for commercial purposes (ie; modeling miniatures for 3D printing, making models for games, etc). Just always have to cover the bases! :) 

Cheers for all the hard work!!!

Dude. Rulin. Congrats on a rad piece of software :)
Awoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I liked it. The program is actually powerful, even though it was released recently. Good luck to you!

I'm genuinely impressed with this tool! Thank you for creating it. Even though I studied 3D art and animation, I’ve always found it difficult to handle complex and especially rounded shapes compared to my peers. With this modeler, I managed to create a cute, chubby astronaut in record time. Getting smooth, rounded forms was incredibly easy, something that would’ve taken me ages in Maya or Blender. Please keep developing it. If there's any way I can support the project or donate, let me know.

Bit of a feature request. Being able to export as a .STL file from SDF Modeler would be great. I am making 3D Models with SDF modeler and it is a pain to import into blender then export as a .STL then import into my slicing program.

Being able to cut out the exporting to blender bit as a .ply would be great :)

its very nice! GREAT WORK!!! but heres my feedbacK: similar to womp3d there are way to many triangles so its not usable for game developement. i look for a sdf modeler where i can even make a character and rig it in blender (maybe a open with button) with no worries about the topology. also i would like to change the spline shapes.

This SDF modeling software is by far the most intuitive and simple to use. I tried Substance 3d Modeler, and it's quite good, although it lacks some fundamental features (it's still quite young). On the other hand, Clavicula is very powerful but has a learning curve. There's also the ConjureSDF addon for Blender, but it's quite performance-heavy. You're doing really good work here, being a pioneer of this new but very promising modeling technique, which has the potential to be the future of 3d modeling. Well done.

I have a question regarding this software. There is one, in my opinion, crucial feature that I would really like to see implemented here, and that's the option to import a custom .obj or .fbx model and convert it into an SDF one. Do you plan on adding this feature in the future, and is there a workaround as of now? I really appreciate any help you can provide.

Hey there all, Hi Sasha,

As a complete noob in 3d formats other than polygonal ones, like traditional OBJ, .ma, .Ply,  blend files, etc, I was thinking about SDF modeling formats instead; 

As polygonal systems share some fundamental data, and can be then converted and shared between and into different software, similarly, is there any "basic SDF" format that could be shared and exported elsewhere ? I've seen some .json files that can be actually rendered somewhere, but could it be transferred to be used elsewhere (in different software using SDF) even if each one wants to keep its own format ?

If not, why ?

Probably my worst question ever, but that could be very useful in an artist point of view... Anyone could tell me I greatly appreciate that. Thanks in advance.

Yours sincerely. Dan

Hi, Sascha.

I've been posting my first real "tutorial"-ish on some features I found easy to use, there :

Perhaps someone could make it faster, more spectacular, but I hate timelapses, because it's cheating somehow 🤯..

Have a nice day.

Dan 

Hi Sacha. An idea (as a fellow Macbook m1 developer) could be to port the entire app to WebAssembly/WebGPU (some unity games have done this on itch.io)

Then anyone with a web browser can use the tool and share their creations: limitless possibilities

Hi Sacha, 

Testing latest 0.51 version Im again pleased to use the latest features and noticed that's rejoining my modeling needs to make this tool uncredibly fast and extremely fun to use. The reference image import, the spline, circular and rectangular repeats etc...all of this is "magic" and I have a lot of fun using all of it. I heard about changing the mirroring plane orientation in the future. Or maybe choosing one of the regular XY,XZ,YZ . This could be cool, even if the actual tools already allow this in some way. Is that in your plans ?

What if posting renders in a gallery for those wanting to show what is possible to make in SDF Modeler now, could that be possible ?

Again Sacha, thanks for your hard works!!! Have a good day take care.

So cool ... it would probably be ... if I could only run it on my M1 Mac ;( Any chance of having a Mac-Version? Even windows under parallels has only OpenGl 4.1 so no chance this way.

Okay so I had trouble running this on Debian. Some of the lib files are not exported as links. Im not sure how you can create installation work but I had to do following commands to get it work:

cd /lib

rm -f libOpenImageDenoise.so libOpenImageDenoise.so.1
ln -sf libOpenImageDenoise.so.1.4.3 libOpenImageDenoise.so
ln -sf libOpenImageDenoise.so.1.4.3 libOpenImageDenoise.so1

rm -f libtbb.so libtbb.so.12
ln -sf libtbb.so.12.5 libtbb.so
ln -sf libtbb.so.12.5 libtbb.so.12

This navigates to the lib folder, removes broken files and creates new links.

Fun and interesting little modeler, great work! Is there any chance you could open source this in the future? I'd love to have a good FOSS alternative to MagicaCSG and extend the functionality. There aren't many serious SDF modelers out there unfortunately.

Hi Sacha,

This is ABSOLUTELY HUGE ! SDF Modeler is becoming a very serious app with everything to get professional results. Now I understand why you choose to arrange things inside it in a logical way before adding a ton of features. This keeps it simple to use and intuitive in the same time. In comparison  to paid (and often very expensive )alternatives, for me it's so nice.Thanks a lot for allowing me to get this for free. I'm trying to share to friends as much as I can. 

Wishing you the best.

Yours sincerely. Dan.

I've been on Itch ever since I first joined the platform but I don't usually comment on things here.

So far this seems to be pretty good! Feels like I'm right at home as for simple SDF modeling since I've been using MagicaCSG for quite some time in the past before the dev scrapped its fully-functional free license (which left me wondering why there hasn't been any updates past 0.0.2).

I know you might've already had this planned, but would you consider being able to insert reference images into the viewport? I've seen Blender, Plasticity, and MagicaCSG have this feature and I'm wondering if this would also be possible—obviously not now.

Hi Sasha.

I tested a lot all the new features and thats looking great ! Im impressed by the infinite potential modeling abilities it gives for the user. I thought about some little toggles that could be very useful to add to get even more intuitive interaction : a reset 0 to position, a reset 1 to scale ( a sketch) , an ungroup button in some way ... Is it in your plans at some time ? 

I must say the linear/ rectangular array is very useful and saves me a lot of time, like all the features you introduced from the beginning. Thanks again for all your hard works!

Bye. Have a nice day! 

Dan

New update looks really good! Feels like this can turn into something great. Are there plans to add cylinders which can be tapered into cones? Also, in your cornell box screenshot it seems as if you can set roughness and ior on materials, but I haven't found that setting (similarly, metalness).