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.
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.
> 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.
Why would anyone use Canva when there are plenty of other more powerful options?
I believe the answer is that it is simple and not scary for people to learn, and that there is a large number of people who could use this and create something that looks pretty good but that would be intimdated with Blender and have no clue where to start. Blender isn't really designed for a casual user to be able to pick it up and understand it in 10 minutes.
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.
This attitude really bothers me. I have no affiliation with Womp, but from the looks of it, it's a cool product made by a small team. And they are giving it out for free - literally for free. But free still isn't enough. Even the notion to get some contact data in the hope that some subset of subscribers might be willing to pay for it in the future is somehow insulting to you. Instead, you want the transaction to be completely one sided: "give me stuff and get nothing back".
"But if they had confidence in their product, they would just make it open and people would try it out. And if they like it, they might buy it later!" - Right? Wrong!
People have increasingly short memories. Even if they like it now, by the time it makes it out of alpha, they'll long be chasing the next, shiny thing. So you have to keep the link alive to follow up on it. That's just good business.
So how about you have some sympathy for the talented people who put this together and give them the chance to follow up in a few months on the off chance that this is something you might be willing to use properly?
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
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.
Hey! As a 5-year Blender user I'm pretty hyped to give this a try and see how it competes. You talk a big game, and I'd love to test your mettle!
As-is, I can't appraise Womp3D as a Blender alternative since it requires me to create a user account. If you ever drop this requirement (or let people self-host the app) let me know and I'd be happy to compare the two and potentially even recommend it as a Blender alternative.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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…
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.
[+] [-] preommr|3 years ago|reply
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-fe...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnRehtfCbo
[+] [-] MathYouF|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Closi|3 years ago|reply
Why would anyone use Canva when there are plenty of other more powerful options?
I believe the answer is that it is simple and not scary for people to learn, and that there is a large number of people who could use this and create something that looks pretty good but that would be intimdated with Blender and have no clue where to start. Blender isn't really designed for a casual user to be able to pick it up and understand it in 10 minutes.
[+] [-] jb1991|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roark66|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wolframhempel|3 years ago|reply
"But if they had confidence in their product, they would just make it open and people would try it out. And if they like it, they might buy it later!" - Right? Wrong!
People have increasingly short memories. Even if they like it now, by the time it makes it out of alpha, they'll long be chasing the next, shiny thing. So you have to keep the link alive to follow up on it. That's just good business.
So how about you have some sympathy for the talented people who put this together and give them the chance to follow up in a few months on the off chance that this is something you might be willing to use properly?
[+] [-] tkk23|3 years ago|reply
Do you know https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/? It is open source [1] so you could adjust it to your needs.
[1] https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl
[+] [-] kuroguro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funstuff007|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|3 years ago|reply
How could you even consider such a thing? /s
[+] [-] gt585|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blooalien|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
As-is, I can't appraise Womp3D as a Blender alternative since it requires me to create a user account. If you ever drop this requirement (or let people self-host the app) let me know and I'd be happy to compare the two and potentially even recommend it as a Blender alternative.
[+] [-] panzerboiler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlben65|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hansworst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badpun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badpun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterpost2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] animal531|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andybak|3 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] FormFollowsFunc|3 years ago|reply
But as a webapp, it is cool looking. I'm curious how he managed to get it to work in a browser.
[+] [-] dlivingston|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Caduceus1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mat_epice|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danybittel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] portlander52232|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armchairhacker|3 years ago|reply
I assume it uses SDFs, though there isn't really any technical explanation for how it works.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jameshart|3 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] thot_experiment|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ekianjo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Mudbox
[+] [-] dmitriid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gardaani|3 years ago|reply
Womp looks like https://www.vectary.com with few additional features.
[+] [-] singularity2001|3 years ago|reply
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
Pretty good end results I guess? No expert on ray tracing or whatever they use.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] richrichardsson|3 years ago|reply
Signed Distance Functions
Nice explanation (with some code) : https://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/07/01/signed-distance-funct...
[+] [-] speedgoose|3 years ago|reply
Before clicking I though it would be about these new AIs that convert text to 3D models.
Example : https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/
[+] [-] jb1991|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gt585|3 years ago|reply