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.
There was the original metaballs. But more recently there's also been sdf addons using geometry nodes [1] that mimic the same workflow - with my guess being that it uses voxels to generate the final polygon mesh that blender needs since it's not a fully sdf editor. Although, while I was googling this, I did find someone that managed to do it by using pure shaders [2] which is pretty cool.
Also, thanks for actually explaining that. I've seen a few examples of this kind of "clay like" sculpting approach that tries to make it easier for artists. Adobe's Modeler uses sdfs for example.
Blender already has metaballs. It's just not user friendly or multiplayer
Interestingly most folks think of 3d modeling as quad modeling/subdivision surfaces, but Toy Story 1 was done completely with NURBs (also supported by blender)
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.
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.
It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on, you can take extra shortcuts and usually rely on higher-end hardware.
> It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on
I don't think that's true. Most games are optimized to limit the number of draw calls and textures. The viewport of a 3D software package has no such limits. As a result, my viewport rarely runs as well as the games I play.
In any case, that's besides the original point, which was that it wouldn't need to run in realtime. My argument was that it would.
It's not a completely impossible goal. Look into what some artists are making with Dreams on the PS4. It uses raymarched SDFs for modeling.
> 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?
I felt the same about having to signup to even see it do something. It's really not about THIS particular product or the people behind it. It's just that I'm expected to do this with seemingly ever new thing that I want to interact with. It's become so common that, for me, the signup gate becomes a decision point where I ask myself "Do I really care/want to see this?". The answer is no a non-zero amount of times and I do bounce off it at that point.
I do get the desire for them to want an audience to give updates to and try to have a consistent user base. The thing that sucks is that not only do they want to email me, so does everyone else. I've never been very protective of my inbox but the volume has gotten crazy recently so that's had to change. If they let me in and then asked for my email to continue after a couple minutes I'd be more inclined to provide it.
> the signup gate becomes a decision point where I ask myself "Do I really care/want to see this?". The answer is no a non-zero amount of times and I do bounce off it at that point.
Cool. You’re not in the target, you bounce. You save time, they save time and bandwidth and get a higher quality user funnel. Everyone is happy.
That doesn't seem like the optimal way of filtering when you're just trying to get eyes on your product. That criteria doesn't have anything to do with the product itself. This is something that's actually relevant to my interests, looks cool, and I'd like to try it at some point.
How about they make the app completely frictionless to try out, and then charge money for it? I don't want to sign up for something before I try it, but if I'm using something I don't mind paying for it
On what planet is it 'free' if it requires you to hand over some of your most abusable info?
The thing that really bothers me is the normalisation of 'hand over your credentials' which inevitably maps to data leaks and identity theft. For what, trying out a product that you may or may not use?
"Free" means different things to different people. For instance, a free phone that records everything you do (not just phone calls) and posts the recordings to soyouwanttobeastar.com might appeal to some and horrify others.
If this free 3D product only required a DNA sample, the group who considers it free might change. Or if it required your signature. Or your corporate username.
It clearly is not free. It has a price. The question is how much different people value that price.
When I got to the signup, I just closed the window. How does that help them? You want as few possible barriers to experience of your product. It's not about denying them some sort of monetization, but incrementally that's what happened because of the signup.
It should be:
- I got you to click my url, here's some screenshots and a description.
- Looks interesting? Try it yourself.
- Like it? Sign up for an account to save your work, or maybe submit an email for announcements.
I think this attitude is a consequence of (a) so many things vying for our limited attention, and (b) people using your contact info in ways you don't want.
It's a reasonable response to the environment we live in, not necessarily a criticism of this specific app. Unfortunately it seems like the OP has wanted something like this for a long time, but their knee-jerk reaction to its outward appearance will prevent them from even trying it.
Like how an allergic reaction is our body's immune system over-reacting to something that may actually be benign.
Roark66 described it as "moderately annoying", not "insulting", so let's please not start an escalating chain of reactions to stuff that hasn't actually been expressed.
But I'm on the same "mildly annoyed" page, because with the large majority of "it looks cool" new products or services I try out, I know within 5 minutes that it doesn't actually meet my needs and I know I'm _not_ interested in it, but I still have to trust that this organization both today and in perpetuity (or as long as I keep that address) will be well-behaved and technically competent in using my information.
Recently on vacation I bought tickets to a museum in a country I was visiting, and in the process shared my email in order to receive a QR code for entry. They have a legitimate use case which involves sending something to me; fine. To my knowledge the ticket sales service involved does not operate in my region, and I would really prefer never to hear from them again after this one useful interaction. Only a couple of weeks later, in the space of 30 minutes I receive _dozens_ of marketing messages from them, each in a different language I do not speak, all promoting the same 10% off sale _for something I cannot make use of_. I assume some bug didn't associate a specific language with my record so they decided to send me messages in all of them. Their "unsubscribe" link was broken, perhaps for related lack-of-competence reasons. There's literally no way for me to tell them I am not in a position to buy anything further from them. But we've totally normalized online interactions that require (potential) customers to trust that an unfamiliar organization with be both well-intentioned and skillful in their handling of your contact info.
Imagine if receiving a free sample at a grocery store of a new product that might be appealing to you but might be entirely not to your taste required you to first give the company your contact info. Or if trying on a garment in a department store required the same trust. In a non-online context, this behavior would be creepy and intrusive. And you know that you might realize in seconds that you hate the mouthfeel of their product, or that the cut of those pants just doesn't work for your body, and no you won't be buying their product -- but you can't claw back your email.
I think in online contexts we should normalize at least one of two other patterns:
- Let people try it for k minutes/actions/new objects without a sign-up, after which the UI is blocked by a modal asking them to create an account. The customer gets to establish whether they actually want to use the product, and the company still gets info about people who are actually interested.
- Rather than relying on _emails_ specifically, account setup could rely on _revocable_ access to any other service that allows sending/receiving messages.
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 :)
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.
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.
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...
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/) has a lot of articles and code explaining how it works. I would start from https://iquilezles.org/articles/raymarchingdf/
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.
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.
Yes, but it is frustrating to limit yourselves and your users because Safari or Firefox does not support some Canvas features, some voice recognition ones, bluetooth or localhost interactions for example.
I really don't like the idea and the practice of helping a Google monopoly, and I am guilty of it at times. But on the other hand, using such features is a way to encourage Apple to upgrade their browser... which they have little incentive because they want apps.
The problem with the Web Speech Recognition API is that for now it more or less requires either:
- including proprietary code (open source browsers are reluctant to do that (widevine is usually the only exception and it's opt in on Firefox and some Chromium forks)) (Google does this for other parts of Chrome at least, idk if it's used for WebSpeech or just live captions)
- interfacing with OS-provided proprietary code (doesn't exist on all platforms)
- streaming everything to a cloud server (likely prohibitively expensive unless you're Google) (Google does/did this too)
Safari not allowing requests to localhost from HTTPS is weird and I'm not sure why it's like that but it works fine in Firefox. Same for OffscreenCanvas which is the only canvas feature I've missed, Firefox finally added it 2 months ago.
Anyway, just don't block specific browsers, feature detect and if possible use a polyfill or ponyfill.
You don't need to limit yourself, just provide usable fallbacks. Most of the time, these missing features aren't critical to your app, so just disable them when not supported. What browser you use isn't a good indicator anyways, as a features are added often and various settings/extensions/policies can disable or cripple features even in browsers that normally support them.
Arrogance? I mean, I agree that things should work in all browsers, but... Someone created this thing and put a ton of work into it, and you're saying that their failure to cater to every possible browser is arrogance? That's definitely not the word.
> their failure to cater to every possible browser
That ain't their arrogance. Their arrogance is declaring all browsers other than the single one they tested to be "unsupported" and not even worth attempting to use with the app. It's one thing to warn against untested browsers; it's another thing to outright prohibit them and kick you back out to the homepage (after collecting my email address with which to spam me, no less).
If it's really a matter of "polish" then the more reasonable approach would be to simply put up a warning while otherwise allowing full access to the application. If it's buggy, then it's buggy; oh well, at least we were warned.
If it's more a matter of some specific thing(s) that Chrome has implemented and other browsers haven't, then it'd be nice to be upfront about what that thing is so that those of us on non-Chrome browsers can bug e.g. Mozilla and Apple about it - and it would further be nice to actually test against the existence of that thing rather than gatekeeping the user agent string like it's 1999.
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.
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....
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.
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).
oh Please ! It's weekend, we can argue whats the right gender-roles and the 'correct way' on Monday. I'm sure the OP has nothing against grandmas or women and simply used languages and expressions that is common.
Forget coding puzzle, the next time I interview someone for a job I will actively try to screen for this type of "high-horse-police".
As a programmer I want to solve interesting problems not partake in woke-police!
So honest question, what is the number one thing on a JD that will put you off from applying ?
When people talk about systemic sexism, this is what they are talking about. The sexism is so ingrained into culture that people don't even think about what they are saying. They just say an objectively sexist thing because it's "normal".
Hi! Founder here. As a woman entrepreneur, building a hard tech company,I’m pretty familiar with sexism, overt and systemic. My only living grandparent is my grandma and I always use her as a point of reference If I’ve built something easy to use.
Exactly!! If we were to ask 100 random grandmas if they are offended by the 'systemic sexism' i doubt they will be offended. Using your grandma as a reference point is a more specialised version of 'hallway testing', although im now probably offending construction workers and narrow passages everywhere.
The world probably is not ending in nuclear war but it ends with all this nonsenses.
For heaven's sake, we got the best job in the world, building and fiddle with computers, math, algorithms and problem solving! And yet some will rather stand on ceremony with this idiocy about we are offended grandmas ! How about you go build something instead of complaining or policing ppl about the correct way to use the word grandma in a sentence !! Are you 5 years old ? Yelling to the teacher that Johnny said a bad word ????
Good for you, keep doing what you're doing and don't listen to these people, people like them just like to stir shit up.
Relatedly, have you asked and observed your grandma using it? Might be interesting, I'd definitely read a blog post about her usability of the product as a sort of UX test.
I was the original commenter, and I can assure you my goal wasn't to stir shit up.
I simply don't like that "Grandmother" is the go-to example of someone who will fumble to understand a new concept. I know there's no active malice when people use the expression (who doesn't love their grandma, after all?), but it's a stereotype that makes older women essentially the butt of a joke.
So would you have been ok if the OP said "it's so easy to use even a toddler can use it ?"
Sure sexism is valiant cause to fight but at some point it's becoming a complete joke and no one takes you seriously anymore ! Grandma's example do apply here.
If you take a 100 random grandmas, 100 random middle aged people and a 100 toddlers and give them a basic cognitive test (not IQ) just basic stuff like
processing speed, problem-solving and tech skills.
You'd be GUARANTEE to see difference between the groups and to pretend difference doesn't exist is just plain stupid and ignorant of the real world.
If grandmas over the world suddenly want to apply to be airline pilots, would you support it ? Would you feel safe ? Would prefer your child fly with a toddler, middle-aged or grandma pilot ?
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