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Comment by arriu | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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