Blockbench – A low-poly 3D model editor | Hacker News Reader

Blockbench – A low-poly 3D model editor

blockbench.net

340 pointsu207750 comments

As it might take a few clicks, this is a tutorial from their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbyCbA1c8BM

It gives a much better quick impression of what this tool is like.

I watched this and the workflow looks identical to blender. I don't see the benefit over just using blender.

The benefit is that it's extremely streamlined and simplified to suit the specific type of assets it is designed to create. It is designed for hobbyists- people creating assets for things like Minecraft and Roblox, or indie games- not for people who already know how to use something like Blender.

If you already know how to use Blender then, yes, do that.

Even if you're familiar with Blender, there can be value in having a more focused tool. I've tried using it for low-poly 3D modelling before and it's annoying having so much of the interface dedicated to functionality I can't use.

Using a limited palette has been a point of friction in Blender, too. You can't update the palette from within Blender, and you need to use tiny UV coordinates.

The entire 3D creation workflow will move to the browser and workstations will become thin clients.

You can share work and assets with the team, collaboratively edit, easily demo, and farm expensive rendering out to compute clusters.

We'll also see more AI-driven construction. Stuff you can't run on individual workstations.

It runs in the browser, for one. Not that it needs to be better than Blender to be interesting.

Why on earth would you want to run your 3D modeling software in a browser window?

Loading a page is easier than installing software.

Whether the sacrifices make it worth it, depends on circumstances.

If it works, it works.

Then, all else being equal, the browser is more convenient.

Also, see Adobe’s acquisition of Figma.

I just installed it and followed the tutorial. After an hour, I was able to model things, paint them and animate them. I never felt angry, to the contrary. My battery didn't take a big hit.

Excellent job.

The main thing that makes this nicer to work in than Blender (for these “pixel art 3D” models) is that you don’t need to UV-unwrap your models. That and the fact that working with “pixel art” painting in Blender is inconvenient at best..

I’m actually working on a plug-in for Blender to enable some of this workflow where you can just straight paint on your models :)

I teach Blender. UV unwrapping is something the students have a lot of trouble with.

For those that don’t know, UV-less painting is usually vertex painting, where each vertex is assigned a color. In this way the resolution of the outcome is dependent on that of the model.

In the case of this app, a UV map is generated, but seems to be quite crude. Two options are presented: per-face and box. I assume box is derived from tri-planar projection. If so, then I assume that it would be impossible to assign a color to anything that is invisible to the projection, such as underhangs. I will play with it and see.

I had high hopes for Sprytile, but it seems to have not kept up with the 3.x transition. https://jeiel.itch.io/sprytile

Looks like there are forks that work! https://github.com/Sprytile/Sprytile/issues/144

Love to see a link to your plugin!

This looks really, really cool. I especially enjoy the "unfiltered textures" (not sure what it's actually called) style, reminiscent of the PS1

It's usually called "Nearest Neighbour"!

“Pixel art 3D” is often used as well..

im into 3d models

im into pixel art

im into combination 3d models pixel art

This is the second this decade old, fairly niche(?) song I’ve seen today.

How does something like this compare to doing low poly work within Blender? I imagine this is easier but I’m not an artist

I've only played around with it for a few minutes, but if I wanted to quickly produce a bunch of low poly assets in this style I'd be tempted to go with this and then import them into Blender. This is because it is set up for the low poly workflow out of the box, whereas you'd have to do a bit of faffing around with shaders etc. to get good looking results in Blender. And I say that as someone who has been using Blender for more than a decade. Being forced to work within the constraints that a tool like this imposes is often a good thing from an artist's point of view, as it reduces the decision space down and allows you to focus on the outcome rather than the tool.

This is why we included 3D Builder as part of our workflow. It requires a lower threshold of expertise to do simple actions like joining models (eg- from 3D scans), which is a much more complex action in Blender and reduces the amount of time our 3D techs spend cleaning up models they receive.

If Blockbench does the handful of things we need, we'll use it instead to agnosticize platform dependency for customers, who increasingly don't have access to Windows.

Can you recommend any videos for basic cleanup in 3D Builder? I'm already using it for basic engineering models to 3d print.

This is such a great answer for newer artists to hear, thanks. I love Blender, but have found myself doing most of my voxel modelling in Voxel Max before exporting to Blender for more advanced workflows. I couldn’t really articulate why, but “smaller decision space” feels exactly right.

Judging by the gallery, this makes a tradeoff giving you automatic consistent-density UV mapping in exchange for being bad at organic shapes. I assume rectangles/boxes are a big part of the tooling.

This style has been getting a lot if support lately. Sprytile is big, but my favorite is Union Bytes Painter.

As someone familiar with Blender, Sprytile looks great, but it also looks as though there hasn’t been a release since 2020. Anyone know if this project is still alive?

Currently incompatible from the main repo for blender 3.x, there are forks but YMMV.

https://github.com/Sprytile/Sprytile/issues/144

Looks very cool. I wonder if there's anything that can't be done in Blender, or if it's primarily the constraints and simplified workflow that would make this useful to work with. Maybe the latter; there's a parallel to pixel graphic editors vs Photoshop to be made here. Sure you can use Photoshop to do 8-bit art, but some folks use the dedicated 8-bit painter tools regardless.

The fact that you don’t need to UV unwrap is something that “can’t be done” in Blender. Though I guess technically the same results can definitely be reached :)

This project looks really cool. Maybe someone reading this can answer this question. I've been wondering what the in-browser options are for easy to use low poly modeling? Are there any application you'd recommend?

Assuming you missed it, blockbench is available in-browser: https://web.blockbench.net/

There's even session sharing! File > Edit Sharing...

SketchUp Free is easy and good for low-medium poly modelling.

This is so cool, I'd never heard of it before but can't wait to try it out. I'm going to check out the PWA version on an M2 iPad, which is quickly becoming my favorite 3D model editing device.

Same - personally it feels so much more intuitive than a Wacom. The new pen proximity animation is really nice.

Been using this for minecraft mods for a while, main benefit of this program vs something like blender is the exports

The web app viewer is very slow for me. Local problem? Or is it super slow to rotate a model for others?

I wholeheartedly approve.

Wow haven't seen this before. Very cool.

Web-app? No, thanks. I'll stick to ms3d ))

Web-app makes it better. You can still download it to run offline, but you can run the browser version without trusting the binaries to be safe, and you can also get it up and running really fast if you switch computers or need someone else to check it out.

And unsurprisingly the downloadable version uses Electron.

Is there a viable alternative for running a web app offline as a “native-ish” application?

Tauri, Wails, Neutralinojs, Saucer, Webview, Pywebview, Ultralight, embedding CEF directly...

Most of them rely on the native OS browser engine, so much lighter in resources at the expense of (possibly) inconsistent rendering.

Ultralight uses its own customized WebKit version, lacks some features, isn't open source, but is a lot lighter than electron.

Embedding CEF directly can be better than Electron as it does not require node.js.

Lots of options.

This might be a little bit too cool for me.

That’s a pretty uncharitable thing to say. A tool like this makes modelling approachable for people who might not have any experience - including kids. Trying to reproduce in Blender, for example, the workflows that this tool easily enables is loads more work - potentially months of learning.

Interpretation-wise, you have several options. But you choose the smelliest. I think you just prefer that particular smell. It's a popular smell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com