How I made a 3D Modeler in C | Hacker News Reader

How I made a 3D Modeler in C

twitter.com

46 pointsdhooper12 comments

Things like this for those who don't know how it's done, who isn't familiar with the particular algorithm - explained briefly in the view - surely look like a kind of magic :) .

Well done!

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it. It's making me want to make more videos about various programming topics.

That’s a bit of a stretch (pun). You have metaballs/raymarch/csg. You used Raylib. You have cracked the surface (pun) but have still a ways to go before you have a full 3D modeler. Still, the power of parametric modeling using csg techniques (Boolean operations) is its non-destructive nature. You can easy move the shapes to get different geometry. It’s super fun to play with.

I wrote a zbrush clone once, once is all I needed. I like that you explained the pipeline the way you did. You didn’t complicate things with terms like “geometry shaders” or “deferred pass” or “multistage”. Though I expected to see brush strokes and sculpting featured.

Don’t think I’m trying to discourage, on the contrary, we need more folks who know this stuff.

I've been interesting in learning to make a paramtric kernel myself. any recommended books or websites I can go to?

CSG is the basis for most of this stuff. Constructive Solid Geometry. Once you have learned Direct Modeling (vertex buffer construction of arbitrary surface normals) then moving on to CSG is just a higher order of that. Geometry/Compute shaders are how most are doing it on modern pipelines and then passing the results to the rendering pipeline. The drivers for the surface are simple geometry shapes combined with Boolean operations in the CSG shader to end up with a solid geometry afterwards.

If you can write a ray tracer, you can do CSG. The OP shows he knows it which is a huge step.

Here’s some papers from my bookmark collection:

https://www.cs.rpi.edu/~cutler/classes/advancedgraphics/S19/...

https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/implementing-csg-6d...

https://dspace.cvut.cz/bitstream/handle/10467/65282/F3-DP-20...

https://thomaspietrzak.com/bibliography/gonzalez23.pdf

https://nvpro-samples.github.io/vk_raytracing_tutorial_KHR/

https://nitter.net/DanielcHooper/status/1737541489985483075

Maybe it's standard, but to someone who's not familiar with 3d modeling tools, the idea of being able to control one with a game controller is brilliant. That makes it seem much less intimidating

As someone who knows quite a bit about 3d modeling, using a game controller sounds hellish for getting anything done.

Have you heard of people using Nintendo switch controllers in modeling programs like this?

No.

Do you have thoughts on Dreams by Media Molecule?

I haven't tried it, but, people seem to be pretty productive with it much in the way they would be with a DCC.

It looks neat for a teenager, I'm definitely impressed at the "all-in-one" idea that it has DCC DAW and game engine together. But the sculpting is clearly pretty rudimentary. One video I saw, a guy had sculpted Kermit and it looked great; but he complained that it took a massive amount of time. In Blender, it would be an afternoon project.

Once you understand what's happening under the hood and you know your hotkeys, you can really fly around and do stuff fast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com