As an end user I give little thought into what goes on under the hood. I appreciate being educated on what goes on behind the scenes. That being said, I am more than willing to pay the extra amount. While I certainly don't speak for everyone I'll take function and stability over price. I purchased and use MOI3d and that's not cheap.
Very informative Nick !! . I think going with Parasolid is the right choice if it means better modeling tools . $100 or 150 is still very affordable compared to the competition.
As long as you don't go the route of subscription fees and leave it as a buy once own forever model I'd be fine with paying $100 and possibly even more.
So you buy version 1, or version 2 and you get v1 or v2 forever - is that really such a great deal? You get v1 or v2 on platform os x on one pc forever. I assume with so many likes about 'not a subscription' it's a popular choice. But if the subscription is low cost and allows you to pause, stop, cancel, upgrade. downgrade or even revert to free with no data lock, then I think subscription, pay (or not) for what you use is a very fair choice. I do understand that at some point, what the app currently does is good enough and you just don't want to pay anymore for a few years at least - I get that...there's no doubt Plasticity is rapidly advancing...
May I know how much does this cost of CAD KERNEL to use per month or per yer pricing model... To integrate with our own CAD model creation.. How to contact this team...
Just discovered your work and can’t wait for Plasticity 1.0 to come. I am an architect and design teacher and I really believe that this software can help to expand the creative mind. A teacher/students license would be great! Anyway for my commercial works I’ll be very happy to support the project, 100 $ still represent an amazing price point. Please keep doing affordable things for the community!
I think this is a very good decision! I'm on Fusion 360 because of the fillet handling and hate the general workflow. I love the artist centric approach of Moi, but don't use it because it's fillets are bad. If Plasticity can merge the advantages of the two programs I will easily buy it for 100+. Concept and CG artists have usually beefy machines, so performance is important, but not as important as the geo kernel and the better handling of wierd edge cases (which you get quite a lot on complex models).
Great Job! 💯 I appreciate the deep dive into geometry kernels, a topic few know about. I applaud your dedication and choice of Parasolid, the most capable of the three.
That's a very informative video. I always loved to understand how my favorite softwares were working. I know a lot of Russian technicians, engineers and designers who pay a heavy price for what one person decided to do. They are the victims that are too often ignored. Working with many of them, I consider myself lucky to be in the company of people of great quality, sometimes friends who have often pulled me out of technical situations that I thought were lost and who lament the situation, wanting only to continue doing what they are passionate about. I would like to pay tribute to them.
seeing that example of the direct modeling complexities that parasolid can handle - that's why it's worth the investment. sounds like it'll make it more reliable. that trust between user/software is a big deal
Very nice to see the reasoning that goes in to the behind the scenes stuff. It sounds like Parasolid is the way to go based on what you explained here.
I have chosen your product first because a friend of mine recommended it and second because your transparently report about what is going on behind the curtain - please continue with it - it will pay off.
Thanks for sharing your decision making process. I remember the days of paying $1000+ for 3d software products and paying $99. Let's just say the one I bought for $99 is actually the one I use most even compared to the open source ones. Why... It's the thought that went into what was delivered in terms of responsiveness and ease of use. You are making the right decisions for your product in my opinion.
you've got this nick! with what you have already demonstrated with plasticity (and the artist-oriented direction you're taking it) I have absolutely no doubt in my mind you will be successful. A couple hundred bucks is nothing, trust your gut!
For a professional freelancer a hundred bucks for a modeling tool is a no brainer. All the best for your project, really interesting to watch you progress here. Please dont sell out ;)
I love the work you’ve done on Plasticity! Really made cad a lot more fun compared to what I’ve tried. I will gladly pay 100$+ once you get to release. It’s still a great deal for such an awesome package!
I say, fantastically interesting... thank you for highlighting / discussing your personal thoughts and decision making processes between the competing geometry kernals. There's no doubt the adaptability of cylinder and sphere (with the attached non circumferential) fillets is certainly better than what I use today. Plasticity GUI looks wonderful - I also think Parasolid is a wise long term investment and if there are advantages in surfacing capabilities to, then all the better.
Oh one more thing. I am a heavy tablet user and I feel very comfortable using MoI3D because it is so super tablet friendly and I will instantly switch to Plasticity if it has the compatibility as well. (Like having a numpad in the UI etc.)
I bought Plasticity Studio today even though Indie suits me perfectly just to help fund future development. I’m hoping you’ll be around for a long time to come!
As someone who is new to all that CAD modeling and is super enjoying it I am glad to pay 100$+ and therefore have a great, stable and FAST software that works. At the moment I am using MoI3D and I love it because it is so simple and fast to create shapes and have fun. I usually work very fast when I am in my creative flow, so the situation with the filleting in MoI3D is a bit frustrating and stops my flow sometimes. I tested Shapr3D on the Tablet which also uses Parasolid and it's just crazy how comfortable it is to use. I want to support you and your new software. It's exciting to be there from the beginning. Good luck!:)
having recently only discovered this world of nurbs modelling after poly modeling myself over the last 15 years, I love plasticity but immediately wished it had better direct modelling features. I'd be happy to pay $100-125 for better functionality and the moral side is good as well. some kind of semi non destructive functionality like being able to tweak shapes after a boolean would be very nice. like an intermediate tweak stage that allows you do interactively manipulate both A and B shapes before finally committing would be a great feature.
Watching this a year later and seeing you worry about going over $100 is interesting. I just started using Plasticity within the last week and paid the $150 for indie immediately as I could see just how powerful this program is. And I'll probably bump up to Studio soon as those xNurbs look too good to resist. But yeah, for any artist doing hard surface modeling (especially artists coming from Blender) Plasticity is a very versatile addition to your toolset. Keep up the amazing work!
every other "nurbs" modeler I know of like Rhino are in the $1000+ category.. even if they might be a bit over plasticitiys scope.. just having access to actual nurbs within a somewhat more achievable price range would be amazing
Right decision I think. the big question is do you want to be selling to professionals or amateurs. I think going for full features at a higher price is a great idea. You will have higher paying customers with more contacts in the industry to be word of mouth advocates for your solution.
To be honest 100 USD or ~670 CNY is not cheap here in China, but still affordable. From my experience, 1000 CNY or ~150 USD would be the upper limit that most people would pay for a piece of software.
Plasticity is better than any CAD software I`ve used and it's not even completed yet. Parasolid is really stable and will put it even beyond. I`m from Argentina and will gladly pay 100+ for Plasticity, totally worth it!
This is a good deal, Nick. If the software ontology had strong direct modeling capabilities and some surface capabilities, I'd be happy to pay for a chunk of Rhino's functionality for tweaking and correcting geometry
Will this have easy and fast slicing tools? like the zbrush clip/slice cutters? Another example is hardops box cutters. This would be a huge thing to have! Love seeing the updates :) keep up the good work!
Now that I think about it.. Slicing (straight line) and box cutter like tool And a focus key (hides other models).. This tool could be a powerful concepting and blocking out software
I can see myself just spawning a cube, cut cut cut add new cube cut cut and bam! It's a spaceship. Oh! Could you add instant (fav shape) thingy to make boolean faster?
In all Fairness fillets also with parasolid will at one point limit direct modeling abilities !!! Filleting is a task with DM I teach my students to do at the end to prevent the issue of not even being able to remove complex fillet surfaces.
@@nickkallen1 that’s true specifically when they a primary surface But if the fillets are secondary / detail surfaces. DM is great but has its flaws - well so does parametric modeling.
Hi @nickkallen1, quick question... What was your opinion on Open CASCADE? If I am not wrong you mentioned it briefly in the video but didn't comment (apologies if I didn't catch it in the video). I am asking because I am considering doing an open source (professional level) 3D CAD and PLM based on Open CASCADE. I know... "super easy target", and I am aware of FreeCAD and they have my massive respect. Your feedback/opinion would be really helpful in this early stage. Do you see any features missing? Speed is not that important (Like for your awesome product). Thank you in advance!
Open cascade doesn’t really support direct modeling so it’s not great for my use case. For feature based cad, I didn’t do a thorough eval. But freecad allows you to do that easily I suppose
Is creating a modern geometry kernel for CAD applications that can accommodate a range of geometry modelling methods and using parallel processing out of reach? I can appreciate it is not an easy task. With little experience in this area it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of such a project. I just feel a modern geometry kernel that suits a range of industry applications would be advantageous.
Hello Nick, will you incorporate into plasticity one of the most useful features of Fusion 360, namely the creation and editing of subdivision surfaces which are converted to nurbs when the surface is open and likewise to a solid when the surface is closed? The object also remains editable as a subd object, even after conversion and for example been booled and filleted with another object... In Fusion 360 this feature is called sculpt mode. In other programs similar function may be found under t-splines. In my opinion this is one of the most useful and creative feature that Fusion 360 has to offer to get away from the typical rigid "block" look during conceptualization and also completion. In that sense its also way faster than anything that standard nurbs curves and surfaces tools offer in that regard.
I'd also love this. A note: he industry really needs to clarify the difference between the recursive polygonal subdivision surfaces you see in Maya and Blender versus the limit surface subdivision surfaces you see in Alias, Rhino, CATIA (Imagine & Shape). You basically model them in the same way, but there's an important difference in how you can use the resulting geometry.
Seeing this video now, a year later, I'd say it was the right decision. But now I'm curious, could you tell a bit more about the open source solutions? Complete crap or just one or two deal breakers?
If this can be used also as a CAD system and overtime develop simulations, I will be happy to purchase it, and $100 would be underpriced in my opinion, but If this ever goes subscription or web based, then count me out.
Very interesting to hear your reasoning and the obstacles you're facing. You mentioned Open Cascade; would it be too much to ask for your thoughts about that?
If you make software that goes back to the old system of pay once for software and pay again for updates, I'll be buying. Subscription is not for me as a hobbyist.
I have ODed for the time being on trying to make this work. It's not working for me for some reason and it's too frustrating to continue, so I'm taking a break. Maybe I'll wait for 2.x. Part of the reason it's not working may be that I use a 34 key keyboard and the keycodes assigned to the number keys and half of the modifiers are different. For instance I had no R-CTRL, and the number keys used the keypad codes rather than the conventional top row codes. I've now changed that, which required some programming, but I'm too exhausted to test them out, and there are probably other things about "Plasticity" that are irksome. One of them is simply the name. "Plasticity" is too general a term to be identified as a CAD program in search engines, so even the name of the program is problematic in the internet environment.
Nick, you have a really cool software. And thanks a lot for some education on the kernels! Subscribed to your channel now :) As far as I know Spatial stopped selling ACIS and instead they started to offer CGM kernel. Did you do any comparison with the CGM? And why didn't you consider Open Cascade?
They still sell acis. Cgm isn’t available for Mac so I didn’t really consider it. I read some of the documentation and it looks nice. Obviously great surfacing. Open cascade is not really production quality.
would you be willing to sell/license the C3D source code? I'd like to continue developing with C3D. I'm not really bothered about extreme fillets and as an alternative to Open Cascade, C3D seems blazing fast. I'm mainly interested in using it for scripting using JavaScript.
If you can add some good surface modeling functionality that would be amazing. I might just buy this to support future development. $100 for CAD software is nothing.
Hey. Loving the software so far, wouldn't mind paying more when it releases. Would it be possible to add a feature like importing a polygonal object (i.e. a hardsurface zbrush sculpt) as a reference so we could design around it (or if it is already possible to import a mesh please tell me how)
It would be good to keep it in a price no more than some 100-120 euros. Otherwise it will not be competitive. And it is better, of course, to have a lively large community of users (who can afford the price) than to have some few ones who have the means to give a huge sum of money. It is a pity that things became difficult with C3D. It would be a good enough solution. As to the moral issues, things are not so as the propaganda of the West is trying to present. But even if it was so, it is a severe mistake to show enmity to all the members of a nation because of their governments' behavior. Anyway, wishes so that you may make Plasticity a great 3D modelling app!
$100 is a bit more than what I was expecting to spend as a hobbyist, but I think I could swing it - although it might be a difference between jumping on day 1 for $25 and waiting a month or so to budget a $100 purchase. Coming from other hobby CAD software having an element "stuck" because of some bevel I did 15min ago is a pain, so I'm excited that Plasticity will use a kernel that can deal with that. I was also not aware that Plasticity licensed Russian code and I'm glad you disclosed it and decided against it. Personally, I don't want to spend any money right now that might end up in Russian pockets. I think the differences are worth the price hike.
I honestly don’t mind spending 150$ on good decent software that helps me and supports the software dev. Just thought I’d let you know that. This software is amazing and I’m having fun with it.
I'm new to CAD design and as a retired academic can't afford Fusion 360 so have the limited to 10 version, because I'm on a fixed income. But I don't like it much. I found Blender much more intuitive so prefer using that, but it's still clunky when it comes to rounding the edges (which I guess you call fillets and chamfers). I have downloaded Plasticity 1.1 and will probably buy it the next time my monthly retirement check arrives. This whole thing reminds me of when STATA changed the computational statistics industry, which had been dominated by SAS and SPSS subscription services.
However, I can't figure out how to use this. Nothing I try works, and I keep losing the object in this vast sea of nothingness because there's no "homing" function. I keep ending up with an inexplicable blue line in the middle of nowhere. I try duplicating edges because you can't make loops but the new edges don't act like edges of the solid, even after I "join" them, so don't help to alter the surfaces into more complex shapes. I was able to create a parallelagon which is the starting solid, but I need to alter the surface or top according to specific dimensions and can't find a way to do it. Maybe this software is not for me. I can at least create the basic object in Blender, but can't even export it so I can use it as the starting point for fillets in Plasticity. It comes in as an "empty" with no edges or vertices, and it comes in with a completely different orientation and scale. I'm close to giving up on this.
...First, please excuse my bad English... If it becomes necessary to improve performance, this step must also be taken.... For your great program, everyone who uses it should also be willing to pay this sum...I am it...
we are from "Hendoi Technologies Private Limited" .we would like to know more details about CAD Kernels from different companies (Features, Advantages and disadvantages,price comparison, Options and support). We would like to purchase soon for our newly incorporated firm...to design Aircraft Designing CAD Tool project. How to contact Parasolid support team...
Wouldn't it hellp you a species of crowdfound where people could "buy" or advance payment for it, to allow you to pay for the licenses and maybe another developer to help you?
Well it’s not the upfront fee that’s a problem, it’s the per seat fee. Hiring a developer would be amazing but that’s a way more expensive and involved process
7:45 "it's gonna be significantly more expensive" Ok, makes sense, so probably like ZBrush around 700$ "...at least a 100$..." got damn it, what? Shut up and take my money!
100 dollars in full vs 300 a year or 120 or 1000+... I'm sure many more people will buy you software if it matches and I hope beats fusion in modeling. Fusion is a huge cpu hog so it's nice that it'll run on older machines. Another plus for you. It'll sell and even if I don't use it to start, I'll buy a licence.
This looks amazing! Wish you all the best. I would definitely pay 125 or more for it! Heal faces, reverse bevels is great for direct modeling. Fusion has it, hopefully it's not hard to add. Also converting face selections to their surrounding edges to chamfer/bevel is quite useful. Edge loop or ring selections are useful too. Since you're running native, I hope you can account for heavy models too. Mechs, environments, etc. Fusion esp. will choke pretty fast, Moi is okay, but neither can compare to an animation package for heavier models (in terms of detail, obv. the geometry is different). With parasolid and a focus on direct modeling, I hope you can achieve an advantage in terms of scaling. For feature film design, we pretty much have to reassemble in a 3d package, since the models get too heavy in Fusion or Moi. Also, keep all hotkey mappings, scripts, and mouse assignments user configurable. Same with camera tumble, zoom, and pan sensitivity. It really matters a lot switching between cintiq, wacom intuous, or keyboard users. Looking forward to an API too for plugin devs! I know that's probably a lot of work, and won't be added right away. In regards to sub-div modeling, honestly to start I would focus on solid modeling and then surface, and lastly sub-d, if ever. It's so much easier to just model in blender a quad mesh and then convert to cad if needed. I would rather have a an awesome solid modeler that does one thing and does it really well, with flexible import /export handling (UNIX philosophy) than another do it all attempt, especially since you're an indie dev (for now?). Just my opinion :)
The key to dealing with heavy models is having users give me examples so I can measure and optimize. Once bottlenecks are removed, you can move (if necessary) to an approach like zbrush where only the active tool is computationally relevant.
I can’t commit to a price yet. However I think it will be $99 for the first year and it will increase after that. However, STEP/iges import export will cost extra
@@francootaola9172 It does not provide push/pull-like operations as well as any sort of "local operation" per se. Implementing such things based on OpenCascade is possible but it's quite a journey.
You have come this far with your programming solo work, and it is incredible! Have you take a look at MOI programme? Oh I saw your old video about MOI now :) (edited) Money transfer issues can be solved easily, may be some legal issues you may have to deal. I've professional friends who use these CAD programs for design, engineer, evaluate etc... I sometimes need to too. But mostly I use Mesh based programs. My experiences about these programs last 10 years are; - yes they seem robust when you really understand the workflow otherwise they can easily crash too. Still Parasolid > ACIS when you need a really complex design. (ex: full with all the cables etc aeroplane) - nice to roll back and fix things accordingly, only mesh solution to this is working with multi save 001 002 002a etc... - yearly subscription method crippled the programs, sometimes 3-4 service packs a year and still no good functionality, only more bug fixes and new bugs occur. - the kernels are old as hell, they don't seem to take advantage of new technologies and/or if they do, they can lose backwards compatibility, which makes cloud systems obsolete - the kernels saying "we work good with high end work gpus" which nowadays just saying "buy X for gaming, buy Y for drawing" the real world difference is only GPU RAM mostly - the late programs are for more "work as a team" oriented, so while I'm designing the electrical engineer can design at the same time on the same file
Nick can I suggest that you make the official videos on plasticity yourself. No offense to the other guy but I think you're a far better presenter for the software.
Parasolid it is then! How's this going to work though? Will you still be giving away free dev releases? Or will we be paying upfront for some kind of close beta privilege?
Thanks for explaining. The moral issue seems muddy, like I don't think the kernel coders had much to do with the military, but the business side yes, I get. Price wise, as sophisticated as you seem to be going as long as you keep it around or below the price of Substance Painter and don't lock us into a subscription model, you will have good sales and happy customers. I will pay for software upgrades and features, not because the calendar date changes.
First of all - thank you for your position on war in Ukraine. As a Ukrainian I really appreciate that. Second - I wonder what jernel does Shapr3D use, because their direct modeling and fillets are through the roof.
