Just fell across this new 3D tool which looks really promising for modeling those things that SketchUp is really terrible at. It bills itself as ‘CAD for Artists’ and is a hard-surface modeler especially targeted at product designers and 3D artists.
It’s been in Beta for the past year and Version 1.0 was released a month and a half ago:
They’ve recently released version 1.1:
The UI looks like an ultra-clean and simplified Blender and reports are that its very easy to learn and fun to use. There’s also a Plasticity-to-Blender bridge under development (which is previewed in the first video above).
Best news is that their business model is subscription-free with the first tier at $99 which includes a commercial license:
I’ve just downloaded the 30 day trial and will report back on my experience.
E.T.A: I should leave a hat-tip to numerobis for his post over at Sketchucation where I first learned about Plasticity:
I was aware of this software, anyways it doesn’t fit my needs, though I like hard surface modeling my main use of the software is architecture, and with plug-ins you can create anything you can imagine on sketchup. But for people doing that kind of stuff the indie license looks attractive.
For most of the past decade the majority of my work has also been architectural design / CD’s, along with some cabinet-making: kitchen / bath design & shop drawings.
Did some product design work a few years back and trialed Rhino for the purpose, though it was a one-off, so never fully learned it. Liked the complementary capabilities to SU though, and had been considering buying a license for another product design project (with the same client).
Likewise, I’ve started with Blender a couple of times: but its learning curve and my project workload never matched up well enough to achieve any real competence. Mostly was interested in the hard-surface modeling (Hard-Ops) along with a SU to Blender render pipeline, so Plasticity with the upcoming Blender bridge is enticing.
I’ve also played a bit with the trial version of Shapr on an iPad and really liked it, but found it too expensive for the amount I would really use or need it. Plus I hate subscriptions
That’s where I think Plasticity can really shine, since it has a short learning curve, clean UI and focused feature set. Been watching a bunch of YouTube videos and there’s lots of (experienced) people raving about it:
Plus, it’s super affordable - especially for CAD software running the Parasolid kernel.
I also use blender, at the beginning it seems that the learning curve is too steep but with practice and watching good tutorials in a couple weeks you are able to create awesome things, I used it a lot a few months ago, but now I’m using twinmotion for rendering more, it’s possible to get great renders in a few hours, blender required more time to fix the geometry imported from sketchup, sometimes it was easier to model everything again than trying to fix an imported model.
