Hey, Thanks for reaching out, did you make sure that the "show in viewport" checkbox is checked? The addon operates on a GLSL Fragment shader that basically Hijacks, or more accurately, overlays blender's viewport. The Placeholders are there so that i could take advantage of Blender's native Transform tools, so moving, rotating or scaling the empty placeholder directly affects the SDF. If the placeholders are there, it means that the addon is creating the SDFs, they're in memory, the fragment shader is just not rendering to the viewport for some reason. pyOpenVDB wouldnt be affecting the viewport as it's only used for Volume to Mesh Conversion and .VDB export. What version of Blender are you using? Is it possible to try running it on a Windows system? I don't have access to a Mac so it's never been tested on macOS, which may be the problem. Also, when did you download? I've handled a couple bugs since i first put out the addon, but oddly none of them were related to what you're describing. Anyway, please let me know about those things about, I'd really like to make sure i get it figured out for you, and anyone who may be having this problem.
Thanks for your reply. I did try Show in Viewport, and I guess the macOS issue may be due to the difference between Windows and macOS graphics libraries. MacOS uses Metal, which should be addressed correctly from the latest Vulkan-oriented Blender API. But if there are OpenGL calls anywhere in your add-on, it probably won't work on macOS.
Does the viewport hijack involve ray-marching, or are you live-meshing the SDF volumes? The ConjureSDF add-on comes with its own custom ray-marching renderer, which proves to be difficult to get right in Blender for macOS, due to some API issues.
By the way, I've added Arcane SDF to my Big SDF Thread over at the Blender Artists forum.
Hi Metin, Sorry for the delay, my wife's been travelling for over a month and she just got back, so i decided to take a break for a bit. Yeah, like i said the fragment shader is a glsl shader so it is using OpenGL. Also to answer your question, yes ray marching is used in the viewport shader. Meshing is only done during the conversion process and is quite intensive, depending on the resolution, bounding size, and voxel count, it can take several minutes on my machine(but my machine is running a 13 year old i7, which is less powerful than a current gen i3, plus I've only got 32gb of DDR3, really the only thing allowing me to do 3D at all is i have an RTX4060, but even that is bottlenecked by the older hardware it's connected to, lol. ) to output a mesh using Marching Cubes method from OpenVDB. There are several other custom meshing techniques hidden in the addon, such as Marching Cubes, Extended Marching Cubes, Dual Contour, etc. But unfortunately i wasn't able to get them working without excluding or reversing faces on the final mesh, so i disabled them in the UI and figured I'd circle back later to get them working properly.
It's funny you mentioned ConjureSDF, because that was my inspiration for making ArcaneSDF. Obviously Arcane is nowhere near as cool as Conjure, but I'm super poor at the moment and can't afford ConjureSDF, so i made my own to play with. Additionally, I've got a standalone SDF modeler I've been working on called Phantom Mesh, because I can't afford plasticity, lol. And while i was at it i thought it would be cool to make a 2D SDF Drawing App, so i did, i call it Phantom Canvas. Neither of the standalone apps are available yet, but hoping to get them out soon.
Thanks for adding me to your Thread, it's helped quite a bit in boosting my views and downloads. I Had no Idea that there were so many other SDF applications out there, I'm particularly interested in Unbound Engine and SDFModeller, so thanks for giving me the link. If you're interested, I'd live to chat in a DM on discord or something my name is james_42pixels or my id is 454943649898430464.
Well, I'm not giving up just yet. I was fiddling around with blender last night and quickly remembered why my addon doesn't support vulkan. I use 4.2LTS because some of the add-ons I use break in newer versions, like my copies of BoxCutter and Hard ops that I bought in a humble bundle last year(those versions don't get updates). Therefore I targeted 4.2LTS when building the addon. I did however test in 4.5, but only in OpenGL(it worked fine. However 4.5 running Vulkan made blender very unstable and crashy. So I gave it up without too much troubleshooting. That said, since the panels and empties show up for you, it should be a simple matter of converting the glsl shader to Spr-v and adding a check to see which renderer blender is currently using and swapping the shader out. I'll have to do some research on a few things, of course, like if blender is able to compile Vulkan shaders or if they need to be precompiled, etc. but I'm going to look into it and see what I can figure out, I'll keep you updated.
Thanks for checking out my application. Please drop a comment telling us about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our app. It's very young and very much a work in progress, so you're feedback will be invaluable in making improvements. That said, please keep it respectful and constructive, Thanks.
Seams interesting because fluid in vewport. Unfortunately a very important missing feature is the dependencies, pyOpenVDB and scikit-image that you should include in the addon, which limits the interest on it, disabling the polygonal aspect for me, crucial for 3d printing or else sculpting, naming a few of them. You could tell me I have to enable internet connection for this to update by itself, but i hate putting my PC in danger, except the poor one where I write text as I do now...Thanks a lot for your interest in making this available. This is very promising indeed! Have a nice day.
Sincerely yours, Dan.
PS: Downloading these dependencies somewhere does not hurt me, and put it in a precise location, if I do not have to type any line of code, because i'm allergic to these manips myself ;))
Hi, Dan. Yeah, the addon is SUPPOSED to automatically install the required dependencies, and while it works for me, I've been told that it doesn't work for others. That said, the dependencies are meant to be temporary while I implement my own Meshing library. I'm Actually working on a GPU accelerated, C++ Meshing Library with bindings for Python and .NET languages so that i can use it for both Arcane SDF AND my other standalone applications. It will also be useful if i wanted to make my own Quad retopology addon, similar to Quad Remesher. I'm also working on a GPU accelerated C++ SDF library , again to be implemented in all of my applications. But yeah, I'm pretty new to SDFs but I've become pretty fascinated, so unless something bad happens in the future, I'm planning to put out some cool commercial AND open source things in the future. For the time being however, i will look into including the dependencies within the addon package itself.
Ok, that's nice indeed!! Thanks for this effort I really appreciate that...This approach of primarly making things light to the computer and meshing afterwards, only if needed is the same direction that ConjureSDF took, but as blender evolves sometimes this limits outer strategies not taking that into account so these approaches to make SDF into blender disappeared. That's sad in a sense that a lot of efforts died with itself. Some other devs took a lot of features from blender itself and now they develop assets that incorporates geometry nodes and made usable and user-friendly interfaces for that purpose (SDF).And now the Grid Volumes nodes includes fields which can be now converted to grids,like I show upthere. And 27 very interesting and promising new volume nodes added which I'm testing now...(for smmothing and meshing, VDB based to name a few)
Are you willing to incorporate these type of things into your future works?
Have a nice day.
Yours, Dan.
PS: Voxel remesher already exists in Blender and works nicely even on non manifold meshes. Did you try this ?
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Interesting, thanks!
I tried it in Blender for macOS, but only the Empty placeholders are visible.
I've tried Fix Viewport Preview, installed Scikit Image, but no result. And when I try to install pyOpenVDB, it returns an error.
Are you using the latest API with Vulkan, or are you using OpenGL?
Hey, Thanks for reaching out, did you make sure that the "show in viewport" checkbox is checked? The addon operates on a GLSL Fragment shader that basically Hijacks, or more accurately, overlays blender's viewport. The Placeholders are there so that i could take advantage of Blender's native Transform tools, so moving, rotating or scaling the empty placeholder directly affects the SDF. If the placeholders are there, it means that the addon is creating the SDFs, they're in memory, the fragment shader is just not rendering to the viewport for some reason. pyOpenVDB wouldnt be affecting the viewport as it's only used for Volume to Mesh Conversion and .VDB export. What version of Blender are you using? Is it possible to try running it on a Windows system? I don't have access to a Mac so it's never been tested on macOS, which may be the problem. Also, when did you download? I've handled a couple bugs since i first put out the addon, but oddly none of them were related to what you're describing. Anyway, please let me know about those things about, I'd really like to make sure i get it figured out for you, and anyone who may be having this problem.
Thanks,
James
Hi James,
Thanks for your reply. I did try Show in Viewport, and I guess the macOS issue may be due to the difference between Windows and macOS graphics libraries. MacOS uses Metal, which should be addressed correctly from the latest Vulkan-oriented Blender API. But if there are OpenGL calls anywhere in your add-on, it probably won't work on macOS.
Does the viewport hijack involve ray-marching, or are you live-meshing the SDF volumes? The ConjureSDF add-on comes with its own custom ray-marching renderer, which proves to be difficult to get right in Blender for macOS, due to some API issues.
By the way, I've added Arcane SDF to my Big SDF Thread over at the Blender Artists forum.
Hi Metin, Sorry for the delay, my wife's been travelling for over a month and she just got back, so i decided to take a break for a bit. Yeah, like i said the fragment shader is a glsl shader so it is using OpenGL. Also to answer your question, yes ray marching is used in the viewport shader. Meshing is only done during the conversion process and is quite intensive, depending on the resolution, bounding size, and voxel count, it can take several minutes on my machine(but my machine is running a 13 year old i7, which is less powerful than a current gen i3, plus I've only got 32gb of DDR3, really the only thing allowing me to do 3D at all is i have an RTX4060, but even that is bottlenecked by the older hardware it's connected to, lol. ) to output a mesh using Marching Cubes method from OpenVDB. There are several other custom meshing techniques hidden in the addon, such as Marching Cubes, Extended Marching Cubes, Dual Contour, etc. But unfortunately i wasn't able to get them working without excluding or reversing faces on the final mesh, so i disabled them in the UI and figured I'd circle back later to get them working properly.
It's funny you mentioned ConjureSDF, because that was my inspiration for making ArcaneSDF. Obviously Arcane is nowhere near as cool as Conjure, but I'm super poor at the moment and can't afford ConjureSDF, so i made my own to play with. Additionally, I've got a standalone SDF modeler I've been working on called Phantom Mesh, because I can't afford plasticity, lol. And while i was at it i thought it would be cool to make a 2D SDF Drawing App, so i did, i call it Phantom Canvas. Neither of the standalone apps are available yet, but hoping to get them out soon.
Thanks for adding me to your Thread, it's helped quite a bit in boosting my views and downloads. I Had no Idea that there were so many other SDF applications out there, I'm particularly interested in Unbound Engine and SDFModeller, so thanks for giving me the link. If you're interested, I'd live to chat in a DM on discord or something my name is james_42pixels or my id is 454943649898430464.
Hi James,
Many thanks for your reply. I totally understand. Too bad I won't be able to check out Arcane SDF for the time being, due to being on MacOS. 🥲
I wish you good luck with the further development of your SDF tools. 👍
Well, I'm not giving up just yet. I was fiddling around with blender last night and quickly remembered why my addon doesn't support vulkan. I use 4.2LTS because some of the add-ons I use break in newer versions, like my copies of BoxCutter and Hard ops that I bought in a humble bundle last year(those versions don't get updates). Therefore I targeted 4.2LTS when building the addon. I did however test in 4.5, but only in OpenGL(it worked fine. However 4.5 running Vulkan made blender very unstable and crashy. So I gave it up without too much troubleshooting. That said, since the panels and empties show up for you, it should be a simple matter of converting the glsl shader to Spr-v and adding a check to see which renderer blender is currently using and swapping the shader out. I'll have to do some research on a few things, of course, like if blender is able to compile Vulkan shaders or if they need to be precompiled, etc. but I'm going to look into it and see what I can figure out, I'll keep you updated.
Hey Everyone,
Thanks for checking out my application. Please drop a comment telling us about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our app. It's very young and very much a work in progress, so you're feedback will be invaluable in making improvements. That said, please keep it respectful and constructive, Thanks.
-James
Seams interesting because fluid in vewport. Unfortunately a very important missing feature is the dependencies, pyOpenVDB and scikit-image that you should include in the addon, which limits the interest on it, disabling the polygonal aspect for me, crucial for 3d printing or else sculpting, naming a few of them. You could tell me I have to enable internet connection for this to update by itself, but i hate putting my PC in danger, except the poor one where I write text as I do now...Thanks a lot for your interest in making this available. This is very promising indeed! Have a nice day.
Sincerely yours, Dan.
PS: Downloading these dependencies somewhere does not hurt me, and put it in a precise location, if I do not have to type any line of code, because i'm allergic to these manips myself ;))
Hi, Dan. Yeah, the addon is SUPPOSED to automatically install the required dependencies, and while it works for me, I've been told that it doesn't work for others. That said, the dependencies are meant to be temporary while I implement my own Meshing library. I'm Actually working on a GPU accelerated, C++ Meshing Library with bindings for Python and .NET languages so that i can use it for both Arcane SDF AND my other standalone applications. It will also be useful if i wanted to make my own Quad retopology addon, similar to Quad Remesher. I'm also working on a GPU accelerated C++ SDF library , again to be implemented in all of my applications. But yeah, I'm pretty new to SDFs but I've become pretty fascinated, so unless something bad happens in the future, I'm planning to put out some cool commercial AND open source things in the future. For the time being however, i will look into including the dependencies within the addon package itself.
Are you willing to incorporate these type of things into your future works?
Have a nice day.
Yours, Dan.
PS: Voxel remesher already exists in Blender and works nicely even on non manifold meshes. Did you try this ?