❤ Community Sponsor: Spencer Magnusson 🔨 Optimize your scenes with the nView addon: blendermarket.com/products/nview-v3?ref=94 🔨 Get the Light Painter addon for free: github.com/semagnum/light-painter

I guess the easiest was to explain SDF modeling in comparison to poly modelling is : With SDF you model the volume while with poly modeling you model the surface

@scaramouche7759

10 ай бұрын

Oh I see, I have experience with solid modeling with Solidworks.

@thesplynter8426

10 ай бұрын

Basically modeling in dreams by media molecule their modeling system is entirely based of this i think

@toriitoraa

9 ай бұрын

​​@@thesplynter8426Yup, voxel based sdfs in way

@polycrystallinecandy

9 ай бұрын

@@scaramouche7759 No, NURBS is still surface modeling. When you create a closed surface, the program just treats it as a solid.

@CameronOwen101

9 ай бұрын

It might be easier to use a comparison thats already understood such as traditional polygonal rendering vs raytracing - SDF is like ray tracing where objects can be described as functions - you can query a sphere function with coords XYZ and get a true/false for inside or outside the sphere, query that function for every co-ordinate in 3d space and you'll get the sphere. Combine thousands of these functions that both add and subtract from space and you can "describe" complex objects with infinite detail and no set resolution limitations

Having worked both in CAD parametric modelling and in low-poly game assets for over 25 years it still astounds me how many artists still fail to get their head around this subject, and I think you've done a pretty good job of explaining it. I've always found a lot of poly modellers scorn my traditional spline based approach to modelling, purely because they've only been taught sub-D methods. Many fail to realise it's because you can guarantee clients will change their mind and so the concept/parametric/virtual (call it what you like) model is usually almost always easier to go back to. Doing art for fun, and doing art for commercial clients are two different worlds.

Fun stuff, this is how everybody used to do 3D 20-25+ years ago with programs like POV-Ray. It was all mathematical programming of basic shapes.

@ianstubbington2334

10 ай бұрын

I used POV-Ray a lot back in the day, I kinda feel nostalgic for it tbh. I would like a text based modeller to play with but with modern render times :) lol

@PeterHertel

10 ай бұрын

@@ianstubbington2334 I still use openSCAD for 3d printing models, it exports fine to blender 🙂

@eternalreturnal

10 ай бұрын

25 years ago there already were 3d modelling software... Hell,Maya is almost 25.

@PeterHertel

10 ай бұрын

@@eternalreturnal sure, I might have gotten the years a bit wrong. 3dsmax was also around I believe. But mesh renderes of the time needed super expensive hardware to not be trash. And the software was not available at any reasonable price. POV-Ray was free 😁

@mpbMKE

9 ай бұрын

It's very similar to old school metaball or NURBs workflows, but with some distinct advantages depending on the refinement tools available!

Respect to this man. Not getting any corporate sponsorships for sake of our community. Yet gets individuals from the community. This surely limits your growth, but you are the only content creator i know i can %100 rely. I press F.

Metaballs are a special case of SDFs. They also have an exponential falloff instead of a linear one, so they are not strictly DISTANCE fields, but the same is true for all SDFs once you start messing with them, like bending or twisting or even scaling.

So excited to see SDF modeling in Blender 🎂I've been following John Kaz myself and the add-on; it'll be amazing. Great explanation, Curtis! Good balance of the high- and low-level.

@Wendy3Dimensional

10 ай бұрын

Congrats on the sponsorship! 🥳

@SpencerMagnusson

10 ай бұрын

@@Wendy3Dimensional thank you! ☺

@Igoreshkin

10 ай бұрын

Thank you for light-painter

@SpencerMagnusson

10 ай бұрын

@@Igoreshkin you're welcome, I hope you find it useful 😊

@yahootube90

10 ай бұрын

Never heard of Light Painter before. Have to say it looks really cool. Nice work.

Probably the easiest comparison for SDF is the difference between vector based and pixel based images. One is described by Vektors, which means you can zoom infintly into it without loosing detail. While pixel based images are limited to the resolution of pixels you choose. Just that only with polygons compared to SDF.

Mediamolecule made this years ago with dreams on the ps4. Been using it myself and its realy fun and intuitive. Happy to see that blender is going to implement something similar because its not possible to export your sculpts from dreams

@antares3030

10 ай бұрын

I wish they made a pc app someday

@igorthelight

10 ай бұрын

Google "POV-Ray" ;-)

I'm finding myself starting a lot of projects in Plasticity and bringing them into blender. Just like the component room to modeling room! So rad!

@kendarr

10 ай бұрын

Plasticity is black magic

Hey, about time Blender got this. I've been volume modeling in C4D for years, it's an exceptionally artist-friendly way to build complex shapes (especially organic, but this is a great example of how it's useful for hard-surface, too) without needing to give a second thought to topology, intersecting geometry, or any of the other pitfalls of boolean modeling.

@ShrikeGFX

9 ай бұрын

Volume builder is so insanely helpful in so many ways

Another point.. I think historically the reason we used polygon modelling and why it was convenient, was because we were able to write algorithms that could run relatively quickly to draw a 3d polygon in space, projected to a 2d viewport, and fill it. Because this was fairly efficient, hardware acceleration was quickly devised for it and that became the standard way of rendering CGI (remember the old Silicon Graphics machines?). From there the industry poured all their resources to improve the fidelity of the polygon rendering (to handle intersections, render speed, transparency and the like) and then projecting 2d textures onto the polygons to save having to render more detailed polygon meshes. Projecting a 2D texture skewed to match the 2d projection of a polygon was even faster than that many more polygons. That all led to the market being laser focused on polygon modeling, despite all the compromises and drawbacks. Some of us that came from a more engineering or scientific background were still trying to use procedural things like NURBS and Raytracing, but an industry that was all about just churning out images, high fidelity was not important, speed was. It's only now that computing power has gotten so far that we're focusing back on fidelity of the render with raytracing, and now fidelity of the models, with these new SDF modeling concepts, and others like them. Now that being able to rapidly generate high fidelity content is the limitation, those are the problems that industry is focused on, so that's why we're only now seeing so much drive for things like hardware raytracing, procedural generators being built into things like Houdini, Blender, and others.

🎂 Thanks for sharing what is coming around the bend! It is always nice to know what to expect in the future. 😉😉❤❤

Great video. I've been using SDF modelling for the past few years through a PS4 game called Dreams, and I'm excited to finally see SDF implemented in Blender as well. This will be great for hard surfaces, as shown in the video, but I think SDF really shines when used to create organic shapes.

@thesplynter8426

10 ай бұрын

SAME BRO

Best explanation I've seen so far, thank you

10:34 - Subdiv modeling isn't a lie, it just isn't implemented the way Ed designed it (at Pixar or before?). Real subdivs automatically subdivide to the sub-pixel level, so no matter how far you zoom in, you always get a mathematically perfect view down to the resolving power of your pixels (and yes, SDFs have the same pixel limitation). The fact that devs write faulty algorithms which stop the subdividing prematurely isn't the fault of subdivs, it's the fault of the devs. The same thing would happen if devs implemented faulty SDF code or faulty NURBS/spline code.

This is a game changer! I switch between parametric, Boolean and polygonal modelling constantly and this appears to be a far more natural approach. The lack of hard edges and conversion to mesh is not as crisp but I'm sure there will be workarounds. I'm excited to see the progress.

🎂Super excited to try out SDF when it's released and I have some free time. I think it's promising. Having tried 3d coat, plasticity/MOI/F360, substance modeler for hard surface concepting - I find nurbs surface modeling to be too restrictive, voxels are great, but remeshing tends to get slow. Sculpting while freeform is difficult to achieve anything non destructive precise, bevels are particularly tricky and time consuming. I do think the best approach is a lossless component editor combined with a lossy polymodeling workflow. In many audio editing DAWs there's a concept of "freezing" that prints to a lossy format. I'd love to see a UI that allows you to freeze/unfreeze the SDF generated components via some sort of LOD or proxy system. Didn't expect to see a dragon cameo in this one - thanks for the shoutouts!

Wonderful I was meddling with plasticity and loved it only getting frustrating with not have the same control Im use to with hardops an blender in general. this could be the next evolution. thank you for this awesome info.

First Excellent video curtis... You explained it very clearly without getting too technical : ) 🎂

I think you should also review "plasticity" because it is also a very new and exciting software which is targeted for hard surface and gives you very high level of flexibility and even with very good precision.

Wow. I can not say anything about the SDF Modelling work as I have been a lighting Artist for many years, This free addon will be a game changer for me. Thank you.

You could cache various "real" versions of that "virtualized" object on first load. For games that would mean that designers/modellers can focus on the shape itself and the engine can bake/cache multiple versions of this object with vertices on load or even at compile time already. If it can be optimized enough to work on a larger scale of objects it would basically mean free and far finer control and availability of LODs at any given point in time. Combine that with lazy streaming of assets and it might not even impact performance that much with a massive gain in more consistent but variable fidelity.

Excited to see the sponsorships start to be utilized on the channel! 🎂👏👏👏

holy cow Blender is unstoppable.

SDF modeling reminds me of how the game dreams for PS4/ PS5 approaches he modeling process. I think that game / creation enviroment acheves a similar approach with some sort of point cloud modeling process but none the less anything that is as fast and versitile and lets you create actual geometry in the end is very exciting. Thanks for sharing as always

@Pixelarter

10 ай бұрын

Dreams do use SDFs. You can find some presentations where they explain how they made the game.

Amazing content as always! 🎂

Polygons - a composition of straight lines. Because the line is a simple (linear) function, that's easier to compute any position on it. NURBs/splines/curves can have multiple control points and weights that affect a position on the line, so it's more demanding on computing a position.

I thought your sponsorship explanation video was a cool idea, but seeing it in practice is even better. I’m getting Light Painter today and bookmarking the other add-on

Shoutout o the addon developer for the effort ..! And definitely excited for this feature to be natively available in blender some day.. 🎂🎂

These feel like a blend of solid modeling and metaballs. Cinema 4D has something similar with open VDB modeling, but not sure if the tech is similar. Your video has actually reminded me of all the different modeling techniques that we have forgotten about but are still valid. 🎂

@mpbMKE

9 ай бұрын

Yup, the volume modeler and mesher in C4D is an SDF workflow.

🎂 yay, new video! SDFs looks quite cool! Isn't the new modelling app from Substance SDF as well? Also, impressive to watch peer reviewed YT video :D

@CurtisHolt

10 ай бұрын

Yep (as far as I know), there are a variety of new (and old) softwares making use of SDF techniques in various capacities. It looks like interest has picked up in recent years.

Might be some misconceptions about procedural materials. They are not in fact, 2d materials wrapped onto a surface, and do not even require UV unwrapping. In fact, if you make a procedural material with some noise to it, and slowly animate the surface shape of an object while keeping the material static with the object's origin, you can see how the material indeed permeates through the object continuously. The limitation is actually on the rendering engine's side of how it computes the material. If I recall, even Cycles only computes the texture upon intersection of the surface, even if the surface is transparent. I thought there was some improvements coming to this, and volumetrics can provide a solution. I was loathed to ever use UV textures because I felt they were just wrong. However, for simple things like wear and tear, I eventually learned that a simple rough texture map was far easier and quicker than trying to make a realistic procedural material. I probably could have sped it up with using addons, but I tend to always do things the hard way in an effort to learn how they work, I guess.

Really interesting. Reminds me of Real 3D on the Amiga in the ol days. I agree that it would be ideal for 3d printing, as we seem to be dealing with solid shapes, and there is less chance of missing or dupe poly's. It also looks like it has built in 'cut away' views to examine internal structures. I’ve been looking into CAD apps, and it looks like this does things in a similar way. Would be great with ‘constraints’ applied. Be amazing if controlled with Blender animation. Bullet holes strafing a fuselage. Towers growing out of scenery, realtime motion gfx cut reveals of illustrations, bugs running around under the skin. Spacial textures would be great for cutaways of concrete slabs and building frames. Interesting to see if the textures would bleed within the fillets applied?

@gottagowork

9 ай бұрын

Hey, fellow Real 3D (later Realsoft 3D) user here, also on the Amiga 🙂Thought I was the only one remembering this software.

I'd think abstract is a better word than virtualized. It's a representation of the mesh before it's turned into a concrete view. Probably stored as some kind of graph data structure under the hood. But that's my best guess.

🎂 interesting as always. Thanks Curtis

I have been working with vector based software to create 2D stuff, I really wanted to jump to 3D modeling but I couldn't get my head around why I cannot just blend objects and curves like I used to do it with vectors... Ha! so this is why! now I can create with my same mindset but in 3D!!! Thank you!

Hi, I see the git hub repo for the light paint addon. It contains a bunch of random files and nothing that says 'instal me' what do i need to actually do to get it to work ?

Thank you so much for sharing info for newcomers to modeling like me! 🎂

Technically metaballs are SDF spheres. The fact that they are triangulated in blender, just means that internally are not rendered using a raymarching technique, but are rasterized to polygons on the fly to use the same gpu pipeline as meshes.

Very well described... all of it!

Native SDF would be _so good_ 🤤

This is incredible. My modeling background (hobbyist.. not pro at all) is moslty Solidworks/Fusion 360. Im very accustomed to CAD style modeling. Ive had trouble with poly modeling, but i absolutely see the power of Blender. This could be a great gateway ....

Component to Model is my workflow when working with Rhinoceros NURBS. After construction, I tessellate to a poly mesh and then export to Blender, Maya, etc. The bottleneck is cleaning parametric ("naked") edges first before export, since they are mathematical approximations and not explicit as in poly modeling.

This is awesome, I cannot wait to get my hands on Conjure SDF! Thanks for the information!

Very interesting ! Thank you 🥮🎶🎵💃🕺

Your component/ modelling pipeline description sounds perfectly reasonable to me. After some time with Blender I still had to get used to that "virtualised..is it real or not" kinda invisible realm thing you described. It would be good to have a way of formalising that workspace.

@CurtisHolt

10 ай бұрын

The idea of something being virtualized is interesting because it's a concept that moves with the frame of perspective. For example, if the real world is our working environment, then everything on the computer is technically 'virtualized', and the word loses meaning when comparing digital modeling techniques (it doesn't matter whether something is polygonal or not). But since here we are implicitly considering our working environment to be the 3D view in Blender, using 'virtualized' to compare modeling methods suddenly makes a lot of sense, because it answers whether we have polygons readily-available to manipulate. In the case of a virtualized technique, the answer is usually no. In the case of a non-virtualized technique, the answer is yes.

@breaneainn

10 ай бұрын

@@CurtisHolt Interesting. Perhaps, as you say, when a broader range of techniques are in demand in the near future, the necessity of separating composition from casting (to use physical terminology) will be more readily evident. Makes sense to me. Cool vid

Always a pleasure to watch your content. 🎂

@CurtisHolt

10 ай бұрын

Wow, thank you, that’s super generous! I’m really glad you enjoy the content. 🥳

Thanks Spencer!

@SpencerMagnusson

10 ай бұрын

You're welcome :)

16:23 light painter looks interesting. The SDF addon seams like it would be fun to make some abstract art with. Interesting video thanks

This is neat! How muc support for this exists in Blender at the moment? And how good is the conversion from SDFs to poly meshes and vice versa?

So are SDFs editable and can they be used in other programs, video, games?

Finally, Ive been thinking of how great it would be to be able to do something like womp3d directly in blender

N-gon supremacy gang !!!😆 also it feels amazing when using triangles on an animated model, feels like you're a professional with the verts

This is exactly what I am in need of at the moment, when can we get our hands on it?

Seems like a boolean function that joins objects and uses proximity and maybe intersection edges to apply a 3D gaussian blur/average to the vertices. Very impressive and very fast. It would be interesting to be able to choos3 the time of transition/blur, as well as the radius.

All the native SDF tools need at this point is a straightforward way to subtract volumes, then all bets are off. Geo nodes SDFs are OP and nobody knows bout it. Thx for the vid

Subsurf objects are definitely perfectly smooth mathematically. Not sure if that's what you meant.

Add on is fire!

There is no cake. 🎂 Great video Curtis, looks really interesting.

Just say this on my recommended and it's wild! Thank you for sharing this! I have one question though: what's your thoughts on SDF modeling for organic characters? All the examples I saw look like they are for hard surface, but it seems like this method could make molding a character pretty intuitive.

@DaveTimperley

7 ай бұрын

www.youtube.com/@womp3D

Quad remeshers are making big strides. Exo's quad remesh is still great although I don't know when it was last updated. Seems like a perfect use for it.

Great video !

so what I'm understanding is it's like vector mapping in Illustrator for example, except in a 3D space. Is that right or am I on copium

There is a game called 'world of goo' which uses fuild joined circles to create web type playfeilds. This could be applied here to give some more organic type structures.

🎂Very interesting, Thanks for breaking it down. 👍

I need this add-on so so badly 🔥

how do i buy it (SDF add-on), would happily pay like $25-60 on Gumroad even for like alpha access + perpetual key; dont care if it crashes or blows up. I work in digital avatars/3d printing/organic surf and need something like this right now.

Hi all, have you tried Clavicula which is free ? This is my personal modeling room and blender is the mesh "operator", my two devices to process. Thanks for talking about voxel modeling, nurbs modelling, cad modeling, polygonal modeling. And the ultimate SDF modeling. Which is of course more flexible. Only one thing is missing : it is shader based and the colors are not preserved when meshing is process. Am I wrong ?

🍰 SDF is just great. I fell in love with it using Dreams on my playstation. Hope this gets a commercial release.

Now that's talking! New way of modelling, good. I build a procedural sculpting geometry node and it works though it would be nicer to have it as hard coded into an addon. Any taker?

SDF was around first with #MadeInDreams #DreamsPS4 since 2013 I personally am making short animations with it! then there are other SDF apps like #Unbound #MadeInUnbound game engine and #MagicaCSG and #Womp3D and #Calvicula and now we are getting it with Blender with #ConjureSDF and some inside Blender tools too! glad to see it's happening for Blender! I personably made some tutorials for Unbound, models with it and short animation with Dreams! funny thing I didn't use it for hard surface at all! I used them for making characters and curved objects! you also can texture paint with it!

there is another issue in that its very expensive to continuously calculate all these things in real time. if you could take that final model and then turn it into a standard polygon model that would be good. One problem i had with node based procedural modeling with blender was the fact that it was annoying to convert to real mesh that doesnt melt my gpu.

Great video 🎂

Interesting! Thanks for sharing. This looks like the primitive "blobs" from the PovRay ray tracer (predates Blender by decades)

then there will be 3d reaction diffusion possible?

Looks nice :)

There is a 🍰 for everyone, though not everyone likes cake. Ah the paradox of 🎂. That said, I'm looking forward to seeing how this SDF modeling addon grows. I feel geo nodes is the best area for it to change and become easy for everyone to learn and use, but that's one thing I've always loved about Blender. Almost every option you can use in Blender has another way to use that option, or even if those other options aren't as easy, they might set up for easier clean up or even the next part of the chain being easier to do making it appealing depending on your work flow.

for me, i really like the concept of 2d & 3d sketching + extrude. Basically, the tools from CAD. I guess blender works in a similar way, but the lack of math makes it ... well, its good for small models, but as soon as things scale, the lack of geometry math in blender becomes tedious beyond belief. You have to go through the whole model & finesse everything manually. such a pain. This is totally remedied by making sketches which have relationships. in the end, the geometric sketch / parametric modeling is faster ; makes better looking models ; easier to change ; easier to scale ; the models are astronomically more robust like for example > u dont have to worry about manifold ; making things that are proportional and that have good ratio's is just inherent ; I mean the list is SO long. The whole hand touching models to edit just feels ancient... kinda like building a house without measuring tools & by using ur hands+eye. Imagine trying to build a wooden box by guessing lengths... I don't know if anyone can relate but I remember in my teen years I wanted subwoofers in my car. Decided to build some quick sealed enclosures and I learnt real quick!!! long story short, the box had huge gaps where edges didn't line up well. reality is real. I thought I was good at woodworking, but that experience taught me about the little lines on the ruler.

this channel is awesome. when i obsess over the science/data economics of Blender, this is my go to. if that sounds nerdy, i can tell you about casting my retainer in a cube of resin epoxy, against a negative composite of my bite imprint. #nerdcrack

I would be interested in seeing a demonstration of exactly how one would create these SDF assets

I'd imagine you could use discontinuities, areas of high curvature, etc. in the SDF field as a way to place geometry and topology algorithmically, where they'd follow the SDF exactly.

Interesting. How does SDF compare to software like Plasticity or Shapr3D?

are you talking into your phone or the microphone? I'm a bit confused there

Looking at how fast that was working, it makes me wonder if you could make parametric sculpting.

🍰 Very interesting. Going to know more about SDF modeling and light painting.

Yes. Please. When?? how much?? this is a must-have!

The analogy of a pixel-based image from a vector image would probably fit. If in 3D, the polygon based modeling would be pixel-based and then the parametric based modeling NURBS is the vector based. But these are for the surface or faces of the object.

As someone coming to 3D from a photography background this sounds very similar to the dynamic between PNG & JPG. One gives you infinite detail via mathematical functions that is real handy for clean cut shapes & anything that you want to scale up or zoom in on. While the other is a compromise that is great at capturing the real world quickly and efficiently, but it does this at the expense of loss and general messiness, especially if scaled up or down (pixelation being the equivalent of the subsurf scaling issue you discussed). Both have their completely separate uses, which is why one format does not dominate and most people develop workflows around knowing when to jump from one to the other - so couldn't agree with you more about your workflow discussion.

@thegoldenatlas753

10 ай бұрын

Did you mean svg? Png and jpg are both rasterized images that are limited by resolution. Svg is the infinite detail one.

Could you use this technique for character modeling? It seems to work really well for if you're trying to make a machine.

@mpbMKE

9 ай бұрын

Absolutely, SDF modeling really shines for organic and/or complex forms.

So it’s kinda like a 3d Version of vector drawing?

In terms of texturing 3D Coat has some sort of texturing system where by you can carve through the surface and the texture is some how updated as if it ran through the object.I don't actually know technically how this is achieved though.

So it's kinda like using vector lines in 2D art?

I wonder if noise could be applied to the surface of the primitives?

No mention of Adobe Medium or Adobe Modeler - pure technical marvel of SDF sculpting and technology.. not to mention the Move and Warp tool which no other app can reproduce - 6Dof move in VR

🎂 something brainy that I have enjoyed watching and and watched it in one go.

🎂 Definitely fascinating stuff. I read a bit about SDFs a while ago when Godot released their SDF-based global illumination system which is really neat!

amazing video as usual, but I thing you need more cameras filming you! just one more camera and I can photogrammetry you XD

another old 3d program used pointy ended sausage shapes to simulate muscles (like the still suits on David Lynches Dune), which were stacked together like muscle fiber bunches, and then resolved an organic shape when the meta ball like smoothing smooshed them all together.

@ViktorasMakauskas

7 ай бұрын

do you remember how it was called? asking for a research:)

@DaveTimperley

7 ай бұрын

@@ViktorasMakauskas Humm, I posted a link but it may have gone off for verification by the channel. I think it was metareyes-plug-in for 3dsmax. I used to ponder 'back in the day' that if one defined the 'muscles' that formed the skin with the meta smoothing, that you could then link the 'musles' to the ik and get the 'muscles' to reshape and thus change the skin topography???

@ViktorasMakauskas

7 ай бұрын

@@DaveTimperley heh, some sort of ZSpheres prototype. Thanks!

Wow!