11 ms·

Womp 3D – The New Way to 3D

152 points by danboarder 4y ago

armchairhacker 4y ago
This looks really pretty. I assume it uses SDFs, though there isn't really any technical explanation for how it works.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dlivingston 4y ago
I really wish I could try it out without having to sign up for an account. I understand compute costs for that would likely be high, though.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  I mean where is the app executed? on the client or on the server? A bunch of JS on a CDN doesn't cost that much to serve, if it's running on a remote server Stadia style than yes, but then what is the goal here? User/Customer acquisition always costs a lot of money... At the very least, let me test the editor quickly, and prompt me to register upon saving a project. edit: I always thought it was stupid that Stadia didn't provide tools like Blender, Gimp and co, it would have been a huge avenue for user growth. Then strike deals with Maxon for instance and run Cinema 4D in the cloud, that's a missed opportunity. Colab allows that, you can run Blender in the cloud and basically use the service as a rendering farm, and it's damn fast. No GUI obviously...
  - kelsolaar 4y ago
    I haven't checked but considering the display artefacts and latency, it seems like it is actually streamed.
    - panzerboiler 4y ago
      I don't think so. It is clearly raymarching Signed Distance Fields, and doing so in realtime is quite slow. Even if you use proper acceleration structures, for every pixel you have to compute the distance to the closest primitive in the scene, and shade it. For a bunch of primitives using simple materials it is no problem even on a potato GPU, but as your scene gets more complex, the performance goes down, quickly. It is a beautiful and elegant technique, but it has its downsides. If you are interested in going deeper, Inigo Quilez (https://iquilezles.org/ https://iquilezles.org/) has a lot of articles and code explaining how it works. I would start from https://iquilezles.org/articles/raymarchingdf/ https://iquilezles.org/articles/raymarchingdf/
      - fishcrackers 4y ago
        womp uses sdf's but it's remotely rendered abductee gave a talk on it at revision a while back
        panzerboiler 4y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I should have read the producthunt page before providing my uninformed guess.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Google just doesn't know how to talk with game developers. Even on Android, it took them 10 years to provide what is basic tooling for game development on other platforms. Games succeed on Android because of the game development community standing in for the lack of motivation and tooling support from Android team, not thanks to them.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Same here, I never bother if I can't try out with some kind of demo account.
dmitriid 4y ago
From the video intro this looks like Kai's Power Tools, but for 3D
- gardaani 4y ago
  YouTube has better videos, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo Womp looks like https://www.vectary.com https://www.vectary.com with few additional features.
Caduceus1 4y ago
Only works with Chrome..
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  For some reason, any app that only works with a certain browser truly grinds my gears. It is the antithesis of the free web and standards. It is the antithesis of what the web stands for. It is the antithesis of why we have to fight for more than one window into the internet. It just brings the whole game back to square one erasing years of progress.
  - keyle 4y ago
    Especially for an app that claims "no downloads, no gray app" ... dude the arrogance.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      I mean, I can understand the challenge of making sure everything works well across browsers so that should mean that we use standard things and avoid non-standard APIs. Otherwise, we're just feeding the shiny Chrome monster more fodder to engulf this fucking planet. May be we should just got back to native apps? Hell, native apps that do not connect to the internet. That'd be glorious actually. Problem with browser based apps is that you have zero control over versioning. Server serves, you get the fix. No option to request a particular version of the app. Don't like the new version? Tough luck. Server issues? Go outside. You know there is something to be said about code/binaries residing on your computer. Call me old fashioned.
      - franga2000 4y ago
        Making sure everything works on all platforms is often just as hard or harder than making sure it works on all browsers and due to basically non-existent security on desktop operating systems, downloading apps comes with a lot of risk. What we need is a new app runtime with a unified permission-based API across platforms. All the OS-agnostic parts of that runtime would be a huge pain to develop, so all platforms would probably settle on a shared open source implementation and only implement OS-specific "adapters" for the native stuff. What I've done there, is reinvented Electron...fuck....
khazhoux 4y ago
- drunkencoder 4y ago
  Or a man, or a cat, or a person who identify itself as a cupboard. :)
- pedalpete 4y ago
  I recently heard on the Tim Ferris podcasts about how in Asian countries age is considered an honour. It's a good way to look at things. What do you wish the ad copy had said instead?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- recuter 4y ago
  Absolutely, I hear you loud and clear. Here is a geicko commercial in a similar vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aj1AlYvxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aj1AlYvxI. :-\ Typical. Hrmph.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    You're proving my point, though.
    - recuter 4y ago
      As a caveman I can be a little slow. Please, explain.
- franga2000 4y ago
  I agree it's overused (especially since it's often not actually true) and a particularly tech-savvy grandma would have every right to be offended by it, but at least the "old people are bad at computers" part is is completely normal and nothing to be ashamed of. It's hard to learn new things, especially if you encounter them late in your life when you don't have nearly as much time, resources and neuroplasticity (is that the right term here? you know what I mean...). As for why it's usually grandma not grandpa, it's probably a case of old discrimination showing up in today's statistics. If you were denied good STEM education and never got a job that involved bleeding edge technology, of course you were disadvantaged when computers started appearing. It sucks and we should work to never do that again to new generations, but history is sealed and I think making "grandma-approachable" tech is actually a very important goal (when it's actually easy to use, not like this).
badpun 4y ago
I hate this trend of where you go to some product's website and, after visiting it, you still don't know what it does and what it's for.
- peterpost2 4y ago
  Same here, for the longest time I thought this was a parody.
- badpun 4y ago
  When I came to think of it, it's possible that the website is not botched. It oozes "coolness" and "innovative tech", while being completely vague on specifics, which means it's probably just targeting VCs and the next round of funding?
- andybak 4y ago
  You might not be the target market? I knew immediately what it might be and had a good sense of how it might be useful.
danybittel 4y ago
Seems to be using similar tech to https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=magicacsg https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=magicacsg
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Razengan 4y ago
Signing up before trying an app = Instant close & forget. At least support something like "Sign in with Apple" so I can forget about you later.
- DrSiemer 4y ago
  Sign up == skip. The "don't spam me" option is always hidden or simply ignored. Got enough crap polluting my inbox already.
jb1991 4y ago
Here is the very welcoming website of the creator: http://www.abductee.org/ http://www.abductee.org/
- gt585 4y ago
  this is true.
preommr 4y ago
It's funny comparing the reviews on product hunt[1] to HN. The former has average people and artists - probably the target audience - favoring the product and then there's HN where people are so low commital that they don't even want to sign in or try a different browser. Anyways, I actually tried it out and... I don't really get it. I would find it frustrating to use when blender is so much snappier and more powerful. I do like the process of using metaballs for design and a lot of whatever the tech is. But I am also surprised at how much effort went into this when this seems really really niche. Someone else linked a video [2] where there's a project with so many layers... bro just use an actual 3d app at that point. Also that landing page is horrible. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/womp-2?utm_source=badge-featured&utm_medium=badge&utm_souce=badge-womp-2 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/womp-2?utm_source=badge-fe... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo
- MathYouF 4y ago
  The main value of using SDF shapes for 3D modeling workflows is you don't have to worry about topology (the vertex, edge, face graph structure which has to be formed over the surface of all 3D models) which makes a lot of modifiers (like boolean combinations of intersecting objects) vastly less tedious (Womp calls this feature "goop"). Right now Blender work still involves a lot of tedium, mostly related to topology. A lot of upcoming 3D ML applications also work considerably better when using SDF instead of mesh representations. I wouldn't be surprised to see this form of 3D modeling take off to a significant degree because of those two factors.
  - dorkwood 4y ago
    You can throw a voxel remesh modifier onto your model in Blender to get the same functionality. It will convert your model from polygons to SDF and then back to polygons.
    - andybak 4y ago
      I would imagine that's a fairly lossy process with some downsides? Ideally - the end result of an SDF pipeline is pixels. Going back to polygons throws away much of the advantage of SDFs. Raymarching is costly and rarely used in realtime engines but Blender isn't realtime so rendering SDFs directly would probably be viable.
animal531 4y ago
I briefly tried it (as an indie game developer). It's basically taking a metaball approach to modeling and performing some form of real time rendering so you can see what the result will look like. It also allows you to add some animation and what-not. Overall I don't see it replacing any serious tool at the moment, its quite slow in modeling (because of the rendering) and precision. What it can be useful for is if someone doesn't have the necessary tools/skills and they just want to make a basic and quick 3d shape like a smiley face, have it bounce/animate and export that to a little gif or whatever.
- FormFollowsFunc 4y ago
  I agree, using SDF for everything is probably not a good idea but it can be useful as a feature along with standard modeling tools. I sometimes use SDF volumes in Houdini to get that blended look. nTopology which is a specialised standalone 3D software use it for advanced 3D printing. You can do things like blend two different infill patterns. But as a webapp, it is cool looking. I'm curious how he managed to get it to work in a browser.
- andybak 4y ago
  > Overall I don't see it replacing any serious tool at the moment, its quite slow in modeling (because of the rendering) and precision. Signed Distance Function modeling has different strengths to other approaches. It's one more tool in your toolbox. One could just as easily say "I don't see [insert other paradigm here] replacing implicit SDFs". In terms of "serious" usage Inigo Quilez did a ton of incredible work on Pixar's Brave using SDF techniques. https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-June-July-2012/The-Royal-Treatment.aspx https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-...
Roark66 4y ago
It is moderately annoying one has to sign up (and give one's email etc) to even see the product in action. Why couldn't they put up a public demo where all your work is shared/can't be saved just to check it out. The fact one has to sign up to see the product in action says to me they either lack confidence in their product, or are desperate to monetise everyone who wants to check it out. I've been waiting for some product to invent a painless way to sketch 3d objects with a touch interface for years.
- tkk23 4y ago
  >I've been waiting for some product to invent a painless way to sketch 3d objects Do you know https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/ https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/? It is open source [1] so you could adjust it to your needs. [1] https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl
- kuroguro 4y ago
  The only thing worse than that is discovering you need chrome after you've given your email away.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gt585 4y ago
    I know- we hate it too. But we had to double down on the browser our userbase uses. We’re working to get it to more browsers as fast as we can!
    - kuroguro 4y ago
      No worries, HN has a way of making me jump on the band wagon of criticizing things. Figured that's probably the case shortly after posting the comment. Best of luck w/ the project, looks awesome from the videos :)
  - FractalHQ 4y ago
    Just use Brave (and don’t press any crypto related buttons if they offend you for some contrived reason)
hansworst 4y ago
If the creators are reading along in this thread, I’d be very interested in an article or even a short explanation with some pointers on how they got this to perform well enough to render in real-time. Every time I’ve tried to create SDF based shaders with many Boolean operations, it kind of starts slowing down to the point where it’s unusable.
ttoinou 4y ago
Is it using metaballs ? Does that mean rendering this with a shader should be ultrafast without any complex triangle geometry ?
- andybak 4y ago
  Raymarched SDFs: https://jamie-wong.com/2016/07/15/ray-marching-signed-distance-functions/ https://jamie-wong.com/2016/07/15/ray-marching-signed-distan...
KaiserPro 4y ago
Interesting, looks like a web based Mudbox clone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Mudbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Mudbox
jameshart 4y ago
You can’t just turn 3D into a verb without explaining what you consider to be in the scope of ‘3Ding’. It seems to be 3D object/character modeling? And maybe a little bit of rigging? Because there are plenty of other things people want to do ‘in 3D’ that are excluded from that very narrow field - like scene modeling, CAD, motion graphics, Sfx, game development, visualization, capture, etc…
ekianjo 4y ago
Sign-up before trying the alpha? Sorry, no go.
aliqot 4y ago
requires signup.... womp womp..
singularity2001 4y ago
"Welcome to WOMP alpha" … and nothing happens (noscript ALLOWING hotjar, still…) Anyways switching to chrome and disabling all security it worked. Why do models take many seconds to load? Interesting rendering algorithm: You see it converge from low res to high res within a few seconds after rotating: https://alpha.womp3d.com/preview/45050 https://alpha.womp3d.com/preview/45050 Pretty good end results I guess? No expert on ray tracing or whatever they use.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gt585 4y ago
Founder here! happy to see people loving the sign up process. We are coming up with different options- but we were against a deadline and had to choose a browser and didn’t have time to do a no- signup experience. We’re working on it, we aren’t Adobe :) - We are a small startup trying to do something new for folks who aren’t into blender (despite it being the most powerful 3D software- its fucking intimidating and hard to use) - that’s it- please proceed to shit on this :) :heart: gaby
- panzerboiler 4y ago
  Thank you for the nice tool, and for all the nice things released by Mercury. I loved ["On"](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65350 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65350) so much, and [hg_sdf](https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/ https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/) is a very nice library.
- blooalien 4y ago
  Blender isn't hard to use … It's hard to learn. Important difference. Once learned, you can do amazing things with it that many other similar 3D software is either incapable of, or far more complex to accomplish the same task. As to Blender being "intimidating", that much is absolutely true. It's also "overwhelming" at first. It helps to focus on smaller tasks when first learning, because it's easy to get sidetracked by all the many buttons and that is where "overwhelmed" and "intimidating" begin. I highly recommend Blender Guru on YouTube as one of several great places to start for anyone interested in learning Blender. He's got a couple beginner tutorials there that'll get one up and rolling in no time at all. It's well worth the effort to learn for those who have an interest in 3D graphics or game development. Having said all that, I'm always in favor of more new tools / toys appearing in this space, and I thank you for adding to the mix.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    They're the same thing to someone thinking about starting with 3D modelling/sculpting. Learning and using aren't two discrete steps that follow each other: you decide to give Blender (or anything else) a try and your use of it guides your learning which guides your use which guides your learning on and on until one day you sit down and realise you're actually pretty good at using Blender. Someone saying "use" instead of "learn", to people who've never used blender, is fine. IF you've never used blender, everything in blender is hard (except maybe deleting that cube) because it's good software, with a rock solid elaborate UI that follows (and shaped) industry-conventions. This tool doesn't, it's much easier to use if you come in knowing nothing.
richrichardsson 4y ago
Anyone as clueless as I seeing SDF littered throughout the comments : Signed Distance Functions Nice explanation (with some code) : https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/07/01/signed-distance-functions/ https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/07/01/signed-distance-funct...
portlander52232 4y ago
Love a lower barrier to entry for 3D. “A new way to 3D” gets the point across. Just evaluating the homepage, I like the fun aesthetic a lot. However, a large proportion of the examples on the homepage have a slight horror/gross-out element to them. E.g., does the cowboy dude have to have his torso swelling and undulating? I think this comes from trying to demo the SDF model overtly, whereas some demos should just be of cool stuff you can make that doesn’t look like it’s made of gooey balls.
speedgoose 4y ago
I watched some timelapse and it seems to be a neat tool. Before clicking I though it would be about these new AIs that convert text to 3D models. Example : https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/
leiserfg 4y ago
Firefox user here, changed my user-agent to the chrome one and the app works fine (just a bit slow).
3qz 4y ago
alpaca128 4y ago
This horizontally scrolling text is so damn distracting and doesn't respect the 'prefers-reduced-motion' flag in the browser.
thot_experiment 4y ago
I'm always super skeptical of these types of things, of course I've been into 3D graphics as a programmer and an artist for a quarter century now so I have some domain specific brain rot for sure. That being said, I believe in conservation of complexity in these highly technical tasks. Complexity cannot be removed, only moved around. 3DCG is an incredibly deep field that necessitates 1000 button apps for good reason. Not to say you can't get cool stuff done in a toy metaball modeller, but it's also not an alternative to blender in the exact same way that you can make glorious paintings in mspaint and it's still not a substitute for Photoshop.

152 points by danboarder 4y ago

armchairhacker 4y ago

This looks really pretty. I assume it uses SDFs, though there isn't really any technical explanation for how it works.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dlivingston 4y ago

I really wish I could try it out without having to sign up for an account. I understand compute costs for that would likely be high, though.

throw_m239339 4y ago
I mean where is the app executed? on the client or on the server? A bunch of JS on a CDN doesn't cost that much to serve, if it's running on a remote server Stadia style than yes, but then what is the goal here? User/Customer acquisition always costs a lot of money... At the very least, let me test the editor quickly, and prompt me to register upon saving a project. edit: I always thought it was stupid that Stadia didn't provide tools like Blender, Gimp and co, it would have been a huge avenue for user growth. Then strike deals with Maxon for instance and run Cinema 4D in the cloud, that's a missed opportunity. Colab allows that, you can run Blender in the cloud and basically use the service as a rendering farm, and it's damn fast. No GUI obviously...
- kelsolaar 4y ago
  I haven't checked but considering the display artefacts and latency, it seems like it is actually streamed.
  - panzerboiler 4y ago
    I don't think so. It is clearly raymarching Signed Distance Fields, and doing so in realtime is quite slow. Even if you use proper acceleration structures, for every pixel you have to compute the distance to the closest primitive in the scene, and shade it. For a bunch of primitives using simple materials it is no problem even on a potato GPU, but as your scene gets more complex, the performance goes down, quickly. It is a beautiful and elegant technique, but it has its downsides. If you are interested in going deeper, Inigo Quilez (https://iquilezles.org/ https://iquilezles.org/) has a lot of articles and code explaining how it works. I would start from https://iquilezles.org/articles/raymarchingdf/ https://iquilezles.org/articles/raymarchingdf/
    - fishcrackers 4y ago
      womp uses sdf's but it's remotely rendered abductee gave a talk on it at revision a while back
      - panzerboiler 4y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I should have read the producthunt page before providing my uninformed guess.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Google just doesn't know how to talk with game developers. Even on Android, it took them 10 years to provide what is basic tooling for game development on other platforms. Games succeed on Android because of the game development community standing in for the lack of motivation and tooling support from Android team, not thanks to them.
pjmlp 4y ago
Same here, I never bother if I can't try out with some kind of demo account.

dmitriid 4y ago

From the video intro this looks like Kai's Power Tools, but for 3D

gardaani 4y ago
YouTube has better videos, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo Womp looks like https://www.vectary.com https://www.vectary.com with few additional features.

Caduceus1 4y ago

Only works with Chrome..

systemvoltage 4y ago
For some reason, any app that only works with a certain browser truly grinds my gears. It is the antithesis of the free web and standards. It is the antithesis of what the web stands for. It is the antithesis of why we have to fight for more than one window into the internet. It just brings the whole game back to square one erasing years of progress.
- keyle 4y ago
  Especially for an app that claims "no downloads, no gray app" ... dude the arrogance.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    I mean, I can understand the challenge of making sure everything works well across browsers so that should mean that we use standard things and avoid non-standard APIs. Otherwise, we're just feeding the shiny Chrome monster more fodder to engulf this fucking planet. May be we should just got back to native apps? Hell, native apps that do not connect to the internet. That'd be glorious actually. Problem with browser based apps is that you have zero control over versioning. Server serves, you get the fix. No option to request a particular version of the app. Don't like the new version? Tough luck. Server issues? Go outside. You know there is something to be said about code/binaries residing on your computer. Call me old fashioned.
    - franga2000 4y ago
      Making sure everything works on all platforms is often just as hard or harder than making sure it works on all browsers and due to basically non-existent security on desktop operating systems, downloading apps comes with a lot of risk. What we need is a new app runtime with a unified permission-based API across platforms. All the OS-agnostic parts of that runtime would be a huge pain to develop, so all platforms would probably settle on a shared open source implementation and only implement OS-specific "adapters" for the native stuff. What I've done there, is reinvented Electron...fuck....

khazhoux 4y ago

drunkencoder 4y ago
Or a man, or a cat, or a person who identify itself as a cupboard. :)
pedalpete 4y ago
I recently heard on the Tim Ferris podcasts about how in Asian countries age is considered an honour. It's a good way to look at things. What do you wish the ad copy had said instead?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
recuter 4y ago
Absolutely, I hear you loud and clear. Here is a geicko commercial in a similar vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aj1AlYvxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aj1AlYvxI. :-\ Typical. Hrmph.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  You're proving my point, though.
  - recuter 4y ago
    As a caveman I can be a little slow. Please, explain.
franga2000 4y ago
I agree it's overused (especially since it's often not actually true) and a particularly tech-savvy grandma would have every right to be offended by it, but at least the "old people are bad at computers" part is is completely normal and nothing to be ashamed of. It's hard to learn new things, especially if you encounter them late in your life when you don't have nearly as much time, resources and neuroplasticity (is that the right term here? you know what I mean...). As for why it's usually grandma not grandpa, it's probably a case of old discrimination showing up in today's statistics. If you were denied good STEM education and never got a job that involved bleeding edge technology, of course you were disadvantaged when computers started appearing. It sucks and we should work to never do that again to new generations, but history is sealed and I think making "grandma-approachable" tech is actually a very important goal (when it's actually easy to use, not like this).

badpun 4y ago

I hate this trend of where you go to some product's website and, after visiting it, you still don't know what it does and what it's for.

peterpost2 4y ago
Same here, for the longest time I thought this was a parody.
badpun 4y ago
When I came to think of it, it's possible that the website is not botched. It oozes "coolness" and "innovative tech", while being completely vague on specifics, which means it's probably just targeting VCs and the next round of funding?
andybak 4y ago
You might not be the target market? I knew immediately what it might be and had a good sense of how it might be useful.

danybittel 4y ago

Seems to be using similar tech to https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=magicacsg https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=magicacsg

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Razengan 4y ago

Signing up before trying an app = Instant close & forget. At least support something like "Sign in with Apple" so I can forget about you later.

DrSiemer 4y ago
Sign up == skip. The "don't spam me" option is always hidden or simply ignored. Got enough crap polluting my inbox already.

jb1991 4y ago

Here is the very welcoming website of the creator: http://www.abductee.org/ http://www.abductee.org/

gt585 4y ago
this is true.

preommr 4y ago

It's funny comparing the reviews on product hunt[1] to HN. The former has average people and artists - probably the target audience - favoring the product and then there's HN where people are so low commital that they don't even want to sign in or try a different browser. Anyways, I actually tried it out and... I don't really get it. I would find it frustrating to use when blender is so much snappier and more powerful. I do like the process of using metaballs for design and a lot of whatever the tech is. But I am also surprised at how much effort went into this when this seems really really niche. Someone else linked a video [2] where there's a project with so many layers... bro just use an actual 3d app at that point. Also that landing page is horrible. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/womp-2?utm_source=badge-featured&utm_medium=badge&utm_souce=badge-womp-2 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/womp-2?utm_source=badge-fe... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo

MathYouF 4y ago
The main value of using SDF shapes for 3D modeling workflows is you don't have to worry about topology (the vertex, edge, face graph structure which has to be formed over the surface of all 3D models) which makes a lot of modifiers (like boolean combinations of intersecting objects) vastly less tedious (Womp calls this feature "goop"). Right now Blender work still involves a lot of tedium, mostly related to topology. A lot of upcoming 3D ML applications also work considerably better when using SDF instead of mesh representations. I wouldn't be surprised to see this form of 3D modeling take off to a significant degree because of those two factors.
- dorkwood 4y ago
  You can throw a voxel remesh modifier onto your model in Blender to get the same functionality. It will convert your model from polygons to SDF and then back to polygons.
  - andybak 4y ago
    I would imagine that's a fairly lossy process with some downsides? Ideally - the end result of an SDF pipeline is pixels. Going back to polygons throws away much of the advantage of SDFs. Raymarching is costly and rarely used in realtime engines but Blender isn't realtime so rendering SDFs directly would probably be viable.

animal531 4y ago

I briefly tried it (as an indie game developer). It's basically taking a metaball approach to modeling and performing some form of real time rendering so you can see what the result will look like. It also allows you to add some animation and what-not. Overall I don't see it replacing any serious tool at the moment, its quite slow in modeling (because of the rendering) and precision. What it can be useful for is if someone doesn't have the necessary tools/skills and they just want to make a basic and quick 3d shape like a smiley face, have it bounce/animate and export that to a little gif or whatever.

FormFollowsFunc 4y ago
I agree, using SDF for everything is probably not a good idea but it can be useful as a feature along with standard modeling tools. I sometimes use SDF volumes in Houdini to get that blended look. nTopology which is a specialised standalone 3D software use it for advanced 3D printing. You can do things like blend two different infill patterns. But as a webapp, it is cool looking. I'm curious how he managed to get it to work in a browser.
andybak 4y ago
> Overall I don't see it replacing any serious tool at the moment, its quite slow in modeling (because of the rendering) and precision. Signed Distance Function modeling has different strengths to other approaches. It's one more tool in your toolbox. One could just as easily say "I don't see [insert other paradigm here] replacing implicit SDFs". In terms of "serious" usage Inigo Quilez did a ton of incredible work on Pixar's Brave using SDF techniques. https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-June-July-2012/The-Royal-Treatment.aspx https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-...

Roark66 4y ago

It is moderately annoying one has to sign up (and give one's email etc) to even see the product in action. Why couldn't they put up a public demo where all your work is shared/can't be saved just to check it out. The fact one has to sign up to see the product in action says to me they either lack confidence in their product, or are desperate to monetise everyone who wants to check it out. I've been waiting for some product to invent a painless way to sketch 3d objects with a touch interface for years.

tkk23 4y ago
>I've been waiting for some product to invent a painless way to sketch 3d objects Do you know https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/ https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/? It is open source [1] so you could adjust it to your needs. [1] https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl
kuroguro 4y ago
The only thing worse than that is discovering you need chrome after you've given your email away.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gt585 4y ago
  I know- we hate it too. But we had to double down on the browser our userbase uses. We’re working to get it to more browsers as fast as we can!
  - kuroguro 4y ago
    No worries, HN has a way of making me jump on the band wagon of criticizing things. Figured that's probably the case shortly after posting the comment. Best of luck w/ the project, looks awesome from the videos :)
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  Just use Brave (and don’t press any crypto related buttons if they offend you for some contrived reason)

hansworst 4y ago

If the creators are reading along in this thread, I’d be very interested in an article or even a short explanation with some pointers on how they got this to perform well enough to render in real-time. Every time I’ve tried to create SDF based shaders with many Boolean operations, it kind of starts slowing down to the point where it’s unusable.

ttoinou 4y ago

Is it using metaballs ? Does that mean rendering this with a shader should be ultrafast without any complex triangle geometry ?

andybak 4y ago
Raymarched SDFs: https://jamie-wong.com/2016/07/15/ray-marching-signed-distance-functions/ https://jamie-wong.com/2016/07/15/ray-marching-signed-distan...

KaiserPro 4y ago

Interesting, looks like a web based Mudbox clone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Mudbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Mudbox

jameshart 4y ago

You can’t just turn 3D into a verb without explaining what you consider to be in the scope of ‘3Ding’. It seems to be 3D object/character modeling? And maybe a little bit of rigging? Because there are plenty of other things people want to do ‘in 3D’ that are excluded from that very narrow field - like scene modeling, CAD, motion graphics, Sfx, game development, visualization, capture, etc…

ekianjo 4y ago

Sign-up before trying the alpha? Sorry, no go.

aliqot 4y ago

requires signup.... womp womp..

singularity2001 4y ago

"Welcome to WOMP alpha" … and nothing happens (noscript ALLOWING hotjar, still…) Anyways switching to chrome and disabling all security it worked. Why do models take many seconds to load? Interesting rendering algorithm: You see it converge from low res to high res within a few seconds after rotating: https://alpha.womp3d.com/preview/45050 https://alpha.womp3d.com/preview/45050 Pretty good end results I guess? No expert on ray tracing or whatever they use.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gt585 4y ago

Founder here! happy to see people loving the sign up process. We are coming up with different options- but we were against a deadline and had to choose a browser and didn’t have time to do a no- signup experience. We’re working on it, we aren’t Adobe :) - We are a small startup trying to do something new for folks who aren’t into blender (despite it being the most powerful 3D software- its fucking intimidating and hard to use) - that’s it- please proceed to shit on this :) :heart: gaby

panzerboiler 4y ago
Thank you for the nice tool, and for all the nice things released by Mercury. I loved ["On"](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65350 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65350) so much, and [hg_sdf](https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/ https://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/) is a very nice library.
blooalien 4y ago
Blender isn't hard to use … It's hard to learn. Important difference. Once learned, you can do amazing things with it that many other similar 3D software is either incapable of, or far more complex to accomplish the same task. As to Blender being "intimidating", that much is absolutely true. It's also "overwhelming" at first. It helps to focus on smaller tasks when first learning, because it's easy to get sidetracked by all the many buttons and that is where "overwhelmed" and "intimidating" begin. I highly recommend Blender Guru on YouTube as one of several great places to start for anyone interested in learning Blender. He's got a couple beginner tutorials there that'll get one up and rolling in no time at all. It's well worth the effort to learn for those who have an interest in 3D graphics or game development. Having said all that, I'm always in favor of more new tools / toys appearing in this space, and I thank you for adding to the mix.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  They're the same thing to someone thinking about starting with 3D modelling/sculpting. Learning and using aren't two discrete steps that follow each other: you decide to give Blender (or anything else) a try and your use of it guides your learning which guides your use which guides your learning on and on until one day you sit down and realise you're actually pretty good at using Blender. Someone saying "use" instead of "learn", to people who've never used blender, is fine. IF you've never used blender, everything in blender is hard (except maybe deleting that cube) because it's good software, with a rock solid elaborate UI that follows (and shaped) industry-conventions. This tool doesn't, it's much easier to use if you come in knowing nothing.

richrichardsson 4y ago

Anyone as clueless as I seeing SDF littered throughout the comments : Signed Distance Functions Nice explanation (with some code) : https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/07/01/signed-distance-functions/ https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/07/01/signed-distance-funct...

portlander52232 4y ago

Love a lower barrier to entry for 3D. “A new way to 3D” gets the point across. Just evaluating the homepage, I like the fun aesthetic a lot. However, a large proportion of the examples on the homepage have a slight horror/gross-out element to them. E.g., does the cowboy dude have to have his torso swelling and undulating? I think this comes from trying to demo the SDF model overtly, whereas some demos should just be of cool stuff you can make that doesn’t look like it’s made of gooey balls.

speedgoose 4y ago

I watched some timelapse and it seems to be a neat tool. Before clicking I though it would be about these new AIs that convert text to 3D models. Example : https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/

leiserfg 4y ago

Firefox user here, changed my user-agent to the chrome one and the app works fine (just a bit slow).

3qz 4y ago

alpaca128 4y ago

This horizontally scrolling text is so damn distracting and doesn't respect the 'prefers-reduced-motion' flag in the browser.

thot_experiment 4y ago

I'm always super skeptical of these types of things, of course I've been into 3D graphics as a programmer and an artist for a quarter century now so I have some domain specific brain rot for sure. That being said, I believe in conservation of complexity in these highly technical tasks. Complexity cannot be removed, only moved around. 3DCG is an incredibly deep field that necessitates 1000 button apps for good reason. Not to say you can't get cool stuff done in a toy metaball modeller, but it's also not an alternative to blender in the exact same way that you can make glorious paintings in mspaint and it's still not a substitute for Photoshop.