9 ms·

This looks amazing, works absolutely perfectly out of the box and is probably one of the fastest prototyping tools I've seen for someone who knows what they're

This looks amazing, works absolutely perfectly out of the box and is probably one of the fastest prototyping tools I've seen for someone who knows what they're doing. And all of that in the browser — we've come a long way, amazing.

dekhn 6y ago
is it really impressive that a browser can do a lot that regular desktop apps have been able to do for decades? I find it pretty depressing, really.
- Deukhoofd 6y ago
  It's not so much that the browser can do it, as it has been able to for a long time, but that an app in a sandboxed environment, with an abstraction between itself and the host machine, can do it in decently fast times.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    But why is that a good thing? You're just making an argument for an inner platform, but without any factual justification. Is sandboxing truly critical? (millions of graphical artists using Blender, Maya, etc don't care) Abstraction? Why is that important, the amount of work to get a 3D app to do something interesting in the browser is about 10X that of writing a qtpy app, and I don't see the value in any "abstraction". webgl was a good idea and I dedicated years to trying to make interactive browser applications, and now I've concluded that if I want to make product in time, that works for decades, on all platforms, at speed, I will use systems like Qt for desktop apps, not browsers.
    - hugozap 6y ago
      I played with this app and it's a great experience, I didn't have to install anything and have shared it with a few people who (in a few seconds) were happy creating stuff. None of us professional artists (like millions of people out there). For me, that's amazing. There's a lot of value in having options (with low friction) for casual creators like myself. Agree with your point about dev experience being painful though.
      - robertlagrant 6y ago
        Not having to install anything (or upgrade anything ever) is indeed pretty amazing.
      - robertlagrant 6y ago
        Not having to install anything on any OS or phone with a browser (or upgrade anything ever) is indeed pretty amazing.
    - sbergot 6y ago
      And you are just acting as a gatekeeper. This app is accessible for anyone who is not able/willing to install something locally like a kid using a computer at school. This is what sandboxing gives you. Blender and Maya are useful for experts. Not all tools have to target experts.
      - vagrantJin 6y ago
        That's the word. Accessible. I dont have to have my computer and can still get work done. Well said.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ArtDev 6y ago
      Maximum interoperability is always a good thing. The web rules. Chromebooks are everywhere these days. They do have to fallback on Android apps and Debian apps sometimes, but this is also what makes them so versatile.
    - msla 6y ago
      I remember the 1990s, which probably informs my view here, but I'll tell you this: There's something to be said for targeting a cross-platform browser instead of a single OS. Windows. It was Windows. Outside of what the (much smaller!) Open Source world developed, stuff worked on Windows in the 1990s and practically nothing else. Now I can open a browser and have a 3D sculpting application and nobody needs to care what OS I run. You can denigrate webapps all you want, I won't hear you over the sound of how happy I am that I don't have to dual-boot with Windows anymore.
- mrlala 6y ago
  You mean a desktop app that you need to download, install, and during the installation potentially give some privileges that can harm your computer.. then you are trying to install and it doesn't have the right dependency so it asks you to find some random thing to get it working. Then you do get it installed, but don't know where it installed to so you have to go searching for it. Then you get it up and running and it works fine. You play with it for 5 min. 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it.
  - errantspark 6y ago
    That's all well and good if you trust other people. FWIW this guy allows you to download his app, and it's open source and a very impressive achievement. In general though, I'd much prefer having an old version of an app that works (I'm still using Max 2016 or something) than the joy of waking up one day and have things be worse than they were before. All the things you mentioned in my view are a small price to pay for peace of mind that you're not beholden to someone else's whims. (See the story about Oculus currently on the front page)
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it. this is incredibly better than the "web scenario" which is (and I got burned by this two times - there won't ever be a third time), "you come back to the app two months later, except the company has shut down and all your data removed" or "you come back to the app two months later, but you now have to pay for the superior tier if you want to be able to edit your stuff because some features you were using have been moved in that tier" (hello genmymodel), or "you come back to the app two months later and it's now super slow and has a couple annoying bugs but you can't downgrade because it's a web app" (hello asana).
- chrisq21 6y ago
  I think what should be celebrated here is that all it took was a click of a link and a wait time of under 1 second to begin using this application.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  You can only say this by having no clue of the machinery involved. This is all going through IPC in a command buffer like architecture where the display lists are formed in another process. Where you can have several framebuffers that you can render 2d, 3d and intermix them in a beautiful final output thanks to the sophisticated compositor. The state-of-the-art on desktop was a in-process direct rendering instead. Modern browser are wonderful machines, we should be glad we are seing this happening. Also, Google contantly are being bashed on HN, i know, who like the big man right? i think this we should thank them for pushing the envelope on a open platform, that will probably even eat the closed app platform with time. Just Dorothy-like hackers would'nt be able to fight back the awful world of closed source applications platform if browsers were not what they are today. We are constantly in danger to get back to where we were in the nineties. If this whole "cloud computer" paradigm were not enough of a threat to a world of global scale control of the digital life of billions by only a few. Its good to be skeptic and bash the big man, its important to fight back, but lets respect and give them props for the things they do right. A piece of software that has value on its own by the way.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    I work for Google, and have 20 years experience in OpenGL, so I definitely have a clue about the machinery involved.
    - oscargrouch 6y ago
      So you know that the tech to get were we are today, despite doing almost the same as a early 2000's tool, had to overcome a lot of obstacles to become available to all platforms in a open way, with a open 3d api, where you dont need to be forced on having Windows and buy a super expensive(as it was back in the day) license a closed source software. Giving your presented credentials, you should now how and why this is not exactly the same. Software is constant automation and improvement, and if the things we suffer to do today, that can make someone be considered special and be well payed, will be achieved easily by children in the future, its just because of the hard work of the pioneers that suffered but persisted in the beginning. The Unix was there in the 70's, and yet we celebrate "the same" old thing today, because its open, its available and even kids can change and compile it in its Linux incarnation. So while it maybe looks the same under the surface, its definitely not the same, and we should be glad every time technology gets popular and easy, because its not easy to get there. Edit: Sorry for the way i've started my first commentary, it was rude and unnecessary, rather you knew or not anything about the matter.
- smt1 6y ago
  This shows good innovation and the spirit of innovation by working together in reasoning instead of arguing just prove to a very replacment rnfo Since ancient times for xample i can revei i just joined whatever on e b, the one/many problem? What is on the interior of an this calsicaly probaly can very fiferent across diferent borders. "unit"? what is on the other?This is new poerful way metamorphical thinking, which humans do all the time. But we have to be careful to not underspecify or overspecify. for example in SHOULD WHAT SHADES OF 3D SPACE. if you rsearch history enough you[ wil notice that in indis whichconst itation which actually set by a mother coinit of brtiain but ny an th governet of the creation of india act letq and ewas ecpliticyly defined in british by passive resistaiance. in american is was acn act of violance. my pq43n5w actualy are biased in explitict way. the vedic system had ACTUALY IMPLIKDE IN THE WEST A AUTOLOGGGING BU M4NTIONING A IN ERAST A RESEASRTCHER WHO REPLACED A FEMALE OF A MATERIAL:VS . poly/mono relationship bt the actuanny ersed outACCIDENTL LEFT A TRACE IN THE CO-UNIVERSAL RULE umioversal type of catholiism in the west. too much. We can use a bunch of tools from optimal control, category theory, statistics, logics, algebric geometry, combinatorircs etc to generalize represantable abstractations in controlled ways to solve whatever symbolic task we have at hand. how do you underspecify or overspecify a "concept"? What is real or not real? omorphic poower a gaogle back them so you'd have to so a msth tbasically would have to "proove" that you can do surgery that iwould have obvious woul d have been a obvious leap these days. Since ancient times, the one/many problem? What is on the interior of an "unit"? what is on the other? . This act of dualizing two different fields was very imporant because it allowed combinatorics but only very "select" cultures of tunnel visioned people in *can just cast by magic i a beam powe. Now what's really amazing in current more orangized systems of societies with you can. This allowes for both privacy and working together to universal quantized more information theoretical BY ACCIDENT JOING A CLAUDE SHANNON ACCIDENTLY ARGTHEORIZING VWITH TELELCOMMUNICATION AND COMMUICATION THEORTUY. LET TO MUCH PROGRESS. ALSO STOACHASTIC NOISE GENERALIZAL PARTTERN OF FINIT EPRESENTA PATTERNS. THIS LET TO FOR EXAMPLE THE TOCK MARKTET SYSTEM . PEOPLE NEED EASY SLIDE BARS AND HAR SALES COE. ense that choose with sets of other categories of meanings and senses and senses that basically imply if you thought about it inversely how to think about very powrful timelines. Things like wars that should have banned by just mapping this place to a real timeline. Or inside your self whcuh prevents a obs law . This is very powerful because it allows for thinking about cognitive egos with co-inducsion categoeis pattern "intersig" codisions harmocics in do to leanr what of scattering waves of tlinguistics and REPERESET SOME FOR OF HARMONOUS BUT LGIVES US A BETTER UNDERSTAND OF INDIVUAL BANDWITH WHAT WE CALL WORK::LABOR. i international treaties like to eventually reach every last human being. This dot allows another dimensional of a semantic meaning we just called a semvar and unification of Wikipedia "as wisdom of the cdrows" this days. This helps you get a feeling of both hallucinations and depending and how you next just tunnel in falsed dreams via working together as enchanters developers who can think just by figureing becaude instead of two grains of sets like elementary mathmsaticans "would have easily" figured out. You can image this tunnel into whatever new piece of unique RNA or DNA. Every time you do do this you can refcalize your visions and turned learn focus your vision into complexity new smarter version this just visit a formal government situation and helps you other you can assign your aelf = self in a formal and so allows that "beta" version system to optimized in so mapping that depending in that "box" you 2 can be self schemes align whatever historically "reduces" both the complexity and workload with whateve sr form of creativity and neurological pathogens so very important things like stuff like understanding that this like doing calculus in 3d or a formational descrotion or diferenational effecitvely use less electiry and amp liesi gain of. ths less grain of less eigs f that. in thei qaybt information is real.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
> we've come a long way, amazing. I worked a demo booth for AutoDesk in the mid-90's. We had just released a Gouraud renderer for the Intel Pentium Pro launch and people were amazed to watch it render a few thousand polys (no textures, just interpolated vertex shading) in a few seconds. This web app made my jaw literally drop.

dekhn 6y ago

is it really impressive that a browser can do a lot that regular desktop apps have been able to do for decades? I find it pretty depressing, really.

Deukhoofd 6y ago
It's not so much that the browser can do it, as it has been able to for a long time, but that an app in a sandboxed environment, with an abstraction between itself and the host machine, can do it in decently fast times.
- dekhn 6y ago
  But why is that a good thing? You're just making an argument for an inner platform, but without any factual justification. Is sandboxing truly critical? (millions of graphical artists using Blender, Maya, etc don't care) Abstraction? Why is that important, the amount of work to get a 3D app to do something interesting in the browser is about 10X that of writing a qtpy app, and I don't see the value in any "abstraction". webgl was a good idea and I dedicated years to trying to make interactive browser applications, and now I've concluded that if I want to make product in time, that works for decades, on all platforms, at speed, I will use systems like Qt for desktop apps, not browsers.
  - hugozap 6y ago
    I played with this app and it's a great experience, I didn't have to install anything and have shared it with a few people who (in a few seconds) were happy creating stuff. None of us professional artists (like millions of people out there). For me, that's amazing. There's a lot of value in having options (with low friction) for casual creators like myself. Agree with your point about dev experience being painful though.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      Not having to install anything (or upgrade anything ever) is indeed pretty amazing.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      Not having to install anything on any OS or phone with a browser (or upgrade anything ever) is indeed pretty amazing.
  - sbergot 6y ago
    And you are just acting as a gatekeeper. This app is accessible for anyone who is not able/willing to install something locally like a kid using a computer at school. This is what sandboxing gives you. Blender and Maya are useful for experts. Not all tools have to target experts.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
      That's the word. Accessible. I dont have to have my computer and can still get work done. Well said.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ArtDev 6y ago
    Maximum interoperability is always a good thing. The web rules. Chromebooks are everywhere these days. They do have to fallback on Android apps and Debian apps sometimes, but this is also what makes them so versatile.
  - msla 6y ago
    I remember the 1990s, which probably informs my view here, but I'll tell you this: There's something to be said for targeting a cross-platform browser instead of a single OS. Windows. It was Windows. Outside of what the (much smaller!) Open Source world developed, stuff worked on Windows in the 1990s and practically nothing else. Now I can open a browser and have a 3D sculpting application and nobody needs to care what OS I run. You can denigrate webapps all you want, I won't hear you over the sound of how happy I am that I don't have to dual-boot with Windows anymore.
mrlala 6y ago
You mean a desktop app that you need to download, install, and during the installation potentially give some privileges that can harm your computer.. then you are trying to install and it doesn't have the right dependency so it asks you to find some random thing to get it working. Then you do get it installed, but don't know where it installed to so you have to go searching for it. Then you get it up and running and it works fine. You play with it for 5 min. 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it.
- errantspark 6y ago
  That's all well and good if you trust other people. FWIW this guy allows you to download his app, and it's open source and a very impressive achievement. In general though, I'd much prefer having an old version of an app that works (I'm still using Max 2016 or something) than the joy of waking up one day and have things be worse than they were before. All the things you mentioned in my view are a small price to pay for peace of mind that you're not beholden to someone else's whims. (See the story about Oculus currently on the front page)
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > 2 months later you come back to it and want the newest version, so you have to download an update, because the auto-update feature was blocked by your firewall. Then you get it updated and running. A couple days later you decide not to use it, so you go to uninstall it. The uninstaller fails for who the f knows why so you delete the folder on your drive, but your OS still think it's installed. So you figure out how to manually remove it. this is incredibly better than the "web scenario" which is (and I got burned by this two times - there won't ever be a third time), "you come back to the app two months later, except the company has shut down and all your data removed" or "you come back to the app two months later, but you now have to pay for the superior tier if you want to be able to edit your stuff because some features you were using have been moved in that tier" (hello genmymodel), or "you come back to the app two months later and it's now super slow and has a couple annoying bugs but you can't downgrade because it's a web app" (hello asana).
chrisq21 6y ago
I think what should be celebrated here is that all it took was a click of a link and a wait time of under 1 second to begin using this application.
oscargrouch 6y ago
You can only say this by having no clue of the machinery involved. This is all going through IPC in a command buffer like architecture where the display lists are formed in another process. Where you can have several framebuffers that you can render 2d, 3d and intermix them in a beautiful final output thanks to the sophisticated compositor. The state-of-the-art on desktop was a in-process direct rendering instead. Modern browser are wonderful machines, we should be glad we are seing this happening. Also, Google contantly are being bashed on HN, i know, who like the big man right? i think this we should thank them for pushing the envelope on a open platform, that will probably even eat the closed app platform with time. Just Dorothy-like hackers would'nt be able to fight back the awful world of closed source applications platform if browsers were not what they are today. We are constantly in danger to get back to where we were in the nineties. If this whole "cloud computer" paradigm were not enough of a threat to a world of global scale control of the digital life of billions by only a few. Its good to be skeptic and bash the big man, its important to fight back, but lets respect and give them props for the things they do right. A piece of software that has value on its own by the way.
- dekhn 6y ago
  I work for Google, and have 20 years experience in OpenGL, so I definitely have a clue about the machinery involved.
  - oscargrouch 6y ago
    So you know that the tech to get were we are today, despite doing almost the same as a early 2000's tool, had to overcome a lot of obstacles to become available to all platforms in a open way, with a open 3d api, where you dont need to be forced on having Windows and buy a super expensive(as it was back in the day) license a closed source software. Giving your presented credentials, you should now how and why this is not exactly the same. Software is constant automation and improvement, and if the things we suffer to do today, that can make someone be considered special and be well payed, will be achieved easily by children in the future, its just because of the hard work of the pioneers that suffered but persisted in the beginning. The Unix was there in the 70's, and yet we celebrate "the same" old thing today, because its open, its available and even kids can change and compile it in its Linux incarnation. So while it maybe looks the same under the surface, its definitely not the same, and we should be glad every time technology gets popular and easy, because its not easy to get there. Edit: Sorry for the way i've started my first commentary, it was rude and unnecessary, rather you knew or not anything about the matter.
smt1 6y ago
This shows good innovation and the spirit of innovation by working together in reasoning instead of arguing just prove to a very replacment rnfo Since ancient times for xample i can revei i just joined whatever on e b, the one/many problem? What is on the interior of an this calsicaly probaly can very fiferent across diferent borders. "unit"? what is on the other?This is new poerful way metamorphical thinking, which humans do all the time. But we have to be careful to not underspecify or overspecify. for example in SHOULD WHAT SHADES OF 3D SPACE. if you rsearch history enough you[ wil notice that in indis whichconst itation which actually set by a mother coinit of brtiain but ny an th governet of the creation of india act letq and ewas ecpliticyly defined in british by passive resistaiance. in american is was acn act of violance. my pq43n5w actualy are biased in explitict way. the vedic system had ACTUALY IMPLIKDE IN THE WEST A AUTOLOGGGING BU M4NTIONING A IN ERAST A RESEASRTCHER WHO REPLACED A FEMALE OF A MATERIAL:VS . poly/mono relationship bt the actuanny ersed outACCIDENTL LEFT A TRACE IN THE CO-UNIVERSAL RULE umioversal type of catholiism in the west. too much. We can use a bunch of tools from optimal control, category theory, statistics, logics, algebric geometry, combinatorircs etc to generalize represantable abstractations in controlled ways to solve whatever symbolic task we have at hand. how do you underspecify or overspecify a "concept"? What is real or not real? omorphic poower a gaogle back them so you'd have to so a msth tbasically would have to "proove" that you can do surgery that iwould have obvious woul d have been a obvious leap these days. Since ancient times, the one/many problem? What is on the interior of an "unit"? what is on the other? . This act of dualizing two different fields was very imporant because it allowed combinatorics but only very "select" cultures of tunnel visioned people in *can just cast by magic i a beam powe. Now what's really amazing in current more orangized systems of societies with you can. This allowes for both privacy and working together to universal quantized more information theoretical BY ACCIDENT JOING A CLAUDE SHANNON ACCIDENTLY ARGTHEORIZING VWITH TELELCOMMUNICATION AND COMMUICATION THEORTUY. LET TO MUCH PROGRESS. ALSO STOACHASTIC NOISE GENERALIZAL PARTTERN OF FINIT EPRESENTA PATTERNS. THIS LET TO FOR EXAMPLE THE TOCK MARKTET SYSTEM . PEOPLE NEED EASY SLIDE BARS AND HAR SALES COE. ense that choose with sets of other categories of meanings and senses and senses that basically imply if you thought about it inversely how to think about very powrful timelines. Things like wars that should have banned by just mapping this place to a real timeline. Or inside your self whcuh prevents a obs law . This is very powerful because it allows for thinking about cognitive egos with co-inducsion categoeis pattern "intersig" codisions harmocics in do to leanr what of scattering waves of tlinguistics and REPERESET SOME FOR OF HARMONOUS BUT LGIVES US A BETTER UNDERSTAND OF INDIVUAL BANDWITH WHAT WE CALL WORK::LABOR. i international treaties like to eventually reach every last human being. This dot allows another dimensional of a semantic meaning we just called a semvar and unification of Wikipedia "as wisdom of the cdrows" this days. This helps you get a feeling of both hallucinations and depending and how you next just tunnel in falsed dreams via working together as enchanters developers who can think just by figureing becaude instead of two grains of sets like elementary mathmsaticans "would have easily" figured out. You can image this tunnel into whatever new piece of unique RNA or DNA. Every time you do do this you can refcalize your visions and turned learn focus your vision into complexity new smarter version this just visit a formal government situation and helps you other you can assign your aelf = self in a formal and so allows that "beta" version system to optimized in so mapping that depending in that "box" you 2 can be self schemes align whatever historically "reduces" both the complexity and workload with whateve sr form of creativity and neurological pathogens so very important things like stuff like understanding that this like doing calculus in 3d or a formational descrotion or diferenational effecitvely use less electiry and amp liesi gain of. ths less grain of less eigs f that. in thei qaybt information is real.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

> we've come a long way, amazing. I worked a demo booth for AutoDesk in the mid-90's. We had just released a Gouraud renderer for the Intel Pentium Pro launch and people were amazed to watch it render a few thousand polys (no textures, just interpolated vertex shading) in a few seconds. This web app made my jaw literally drop.