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Comment by arjonagelhout | Hacker News Reader

I'm building my own polygon modeling app for iOS as a side-project [0], so I feel a bit conflicted.

Getting fully featured Blender on the iPad will be amazing for things like Grease Pencil (drawing in 3D) or texture painting, but on the other hand my side-project just became a little bit less relevant.

I'll have to take a look at whether I can make some contributions to Blender.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/shapereality-3d-modeling/id674...

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There’s also the excellent Nomad Sculpt, which while not a mesh editor, is an incredibly performant digital sculpting app. Compared to Blender’s sculpt workflow it maintains a higher frame rate and smaller memory footprint with a higher vertex count. Of course it’s much more limited than Blender but its sculpting workflow is much better and then you can export to Blender.

There is room for more than one modeling app on iOS as long as you can offer something that Blender doesn’t, even if it’s just better performance.

How does it compare to blender 4.5 with Vulcan enabled?

Just for reference I’m running 4.5 with the Vulcan backend and sculpting a 6.3 million vertex object completely smoothly and Blender is using 4 GB of RAM and 2.5 GB of video RAM. Granted my system has a 9800 x3D and a 5070ti.

One thing Blender lacks is easy 3D texture painting. As far as I know, neither is there a decent 3D texture painting iPad app. Definitely a gap in the market.

Procreate allows to load and paint 3d models. It is nothing like Substance painter, but it might work for some usages.

Not even a close comparison. There’s painting colors and then there’s texture painting (masks, alphas, normals, specular).

Yes. And you can paint textures too with Procreate. But like a said, not as advanced as Substance painter and others. It might still be enough for some use cases.

Source: https://procreate.com/procreate/3d

This might scratch that itch? (not really my domain, but I happened to see this recently, so my apologies to you if it's not what you mean)

"UberPaint: Layer-based Material Painting for Blender (PUBLIC BETA)" https://theworkshopwarrior.gumroad.com/l/uberpaint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meX3cbtdVbI

Yes… I have seen this before and played with it. This was a good attempt at emulating the behavior of an app like Substance Painter. However… the core problem is that in order to paint textures you need very complex and deep functionality. When using Substance, I have to variously consider: the texture channels (e.g. color, roughness etc), the many layers that may serve these channels, the baked texture channels (e.g. ambient occlusion, normals etc), the many blend modes, masks and adjustments that serve and interconnect all these.

I doubt that anything other than native blender functionality could serve all this with any elegance.

I teach substance painter and it does a good job and hiding all this complexity until you need it. It is very common for students to underestimate it as an app… to view it as just photoshop for 3D.

To cheer you up, in my experience over the existence of the App Store, anytime something like this comes to the Store is a big win for independent side projects. Your project might possibly be way cheaper and solve a specific problem, so it would benefit from the awareness that Blender's large marketing footprint would inevitably leave behind ;) Keep building!

> Your project might possibly be way cheaper

Eh ... blender is open source.

I'm currently in contact with the Blender team to see where I could contribute, but you're right that there is space for multiple projects.

I think I'm going to focus more on CAD / architectural use cases, instead of attempting feature parity with Blender's main selling points (rendering, hard-surface modeling, sculpting).

>> my side-project just became a little bit less relevant.

Blender has a pretty big learning curve. Since your app has a much narrower focus, you can still make something a lot of people will use.

Having been in the app development game for a long time, I know the feeling but have also learned to realize that this is actually not a negative; it means there's a strong signal that there's a desire for 3D apps on these touch devices. Competition can be really good. And your app has the ability to be more focused vs a legacy app that has to please a very large user-base who've come to expect it to behave a certain way.

That's a good way of looking at it!

I'm definitely aiming to build a more focused app compared Blender, as I want to focus explicitly on modeling, e.g. BRep or NURBs.

What kind of apps have you worked on?

Well, funny enough I'm actually working on a visionOS sculpting app at the moment! It's metaballs based, and kind of a different vibe / niche than what you're going for.

Eg, more like a sketch than asset production, and metaballs-focused which obviously is going to create a very different topology than NURBS, etc.

My first app was Polychord for iPad which is a music making app that came out in 2010.

These days Vibescape for visionOS is a big one for me, and there are others. I also worked in the corporate world for about a decade working on apps at Google, etc.

On the contrary, your project just became even more relevant. Blender badly needs an alternative/competitor. Everybody loses if a single project dominates.

blender is fortunately open-source...

So is Chromium. But, like with web browsers, competition is always good.

Blender is nothing like chromium. It's not made by a big company, it sprung up in an extremely for-profit niche (and it has like 4 serious competitors that are all actively in use)

and chromium is (arguably) great. lot's of great browsers are based off it at least.

Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D...

Blender has a ton of competitors. They're all commercial and have corporate backing. If anything, blender is the "little guy". It is utterly amazing what Ton has managed to do with Blender.

Calling Blender an underdog isn't accurate at all. It has easily the most reach and biggest use base of all of them.

I would think Maya is the most influential of all of them. Blender is popular among hobbyists and people who aren't able to shell out a few thousand every year, but Maya dominates in the commercial world. Plus many animators are using Unreal Engine just for traditional animation now

Absolutely correct.

Blender is absolutely an underdog in commercial studios. It is used, but it’s the minority tool for professional settings. There are still several areas blender is lacking compared to maya or 3dsmax.

Have you see picocad? It is hands down one of my favorite pieces of software

I haven't used picocad, but I came across it once before. It looks adorable! I'll definitely check out its UX.

have you seen the guy doing Feather 3D for iPad? there's a lot of demand for 3D on touch screens, but hard to find the how.

I didn't know about Feather 3D, but it looks super aesthetically pleasing. I'll have to try it out.

I tried uMake a while back, but found the 3D viewport navigation a bit hard to use, and would often find out I had been drawing on the wrong plane after orbiting the camera.

After using something like Tilt Brush in VR, it's hard to go back to a 2D screen that doesn't instantly communicate the 3D location of the brush strokes you're placing.

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