What are the pitfalls?

[MadMinstrel]

I've largely ignored Modeler up till now because of the subscription stuff. Now that it's on steam, I've watched a couple videos and it looks pretty good.

But there's always stuff that you expect to be there and it isn't. So could a user kindly point out the places where it's still lacking so that I might not be too disappointed when/if I buy it?

How's the performance, how heavy are the models it can handle? How is the brush feel in sculpting compared to good old zbrush? Can you do small details and textures like with Z? Can you do precise modelling in VR or do they simply not let you manipulate stuff with widgets? The SDF stuff is nice, but can you also do classic tried and true Catmul-Clark modelling? What about retopology? UV unwrap and layout? Scripting/plugins? Does it crash a lot? Anything else at all?

Tell me your woes! Haha.

[MadMinstrel]

Nobody? Oh well. Guess I'll find out myself.

[VJFranzK]

It's only Signed Distance Fields, right? No other object types.
I am wondering if it is right for what I like to build. On Medium, I would sometimes get stuck with a "pixelated" or chunky appearance. I got better results from Gravity Sketch, but it's apples to oranges, obviously

[MadMinstrel]

Yup, so it appears, only SDFs. But it's not very chunky or pixelated here, it's quite nice. I've only used it for an hour though, so don't take my word for it.

[Elemeno.]

... its a very earl build ... hopefully the coming years add more tools an better ways to manipulate the mesh etc...

precision modelling is impossible , and any kind of detailed art sculpting is hard ... so i suppose ill get it to support them take on the 3d world but i wont need it in my workflow

[MadMinstrel]

So yeah, I'm not really happy with Modeler. Only the primitives can be scaled non-uniformly, layers cannot which is just madness. You can't bring in pictures or meshes as references. You can't offset or inset layers, or hollow them out. There's no modifiers or filters to smooth your model. The exported meshes are just triangle soup in tri mode, and topological nonsense in quad mode. There are no splines. You can't draw a straight line unless it's along an axis. There is a thing called layers, but that's just objects, there are no actual layers that you can mask and do stuff with. The one I *really* didn't expect is that you can't use textures or textured brushes at all, what with Modeler coming from the same place that gave us Painter and Designer.

So I requested a refund. They rejected it because it took me 4 hours to discover all that, not 2. I'm not amused.

I don't suppose you could convince Steam otherwise @Jerc? Pretty please? Yeah, I should have done more research before I clicked the buy button, but Allegorithmic had never let me down before, so... I promise I'll still buy it in a year or two when it's a bit more mature? ;)

As it is, I'm sorry, but It just can't do the things I need from it. It's kind of in a state where you can play around with it, and come up with some cool-looking stuff as long as you don't have something specific in mind. When you want a specific shape however, that isn't easy to break down into a few primitives, it's quite hard. At least that's my impression after 4 hours.

It's still very promising, and I'd be quite happy with my purchase if this wasn't a yearly thing, because I'm pretty sure it's gonna get longer than a year to get it to a state where I'd seriously start using it.

[Elemeno.]

Originally posted by MadMinstrel:

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.... but i think they give you a years updates once this is out of alpha beta etc.. once thats done .. and they do a full release then you get a years updates

[MadMinstrel]

This is not a beta or an early access or anything like that, unfortunately, though it should be. This is a final product, and you only get updates till the end of 2023.

[Elemeno.]

Originally posted by MadMinstrel:

This is not a beta or an early access or anything like that, unfortunately, though it should be. This is a final product, and you only get updates till the end of 2023.

yea i know... i thought this was early access price etc..

they have just said they have plenty of updates coming soon with extra tools...

right now i use 3dcoat and zbrush so i dont really need it at the moment but if they can do some amazing stuff that would be good

[MadMinstrel]

Oh I've no doubt there will be some stuff added, but the list of things that need addressing before Modeler is usable for work is pretty long. (For my work at least, no doubt there's people who will find the toolset sufficient.)

So come on devs, let me get that refund please? It's not like I finished your game in those 4 hours and now want my money back, I just made the mistake of leaving it in the background while watching the tutorials and searching the discord. Hadn't occurred to me that I might need a refund at that point :(