The End user doesn’t care about the kernel stuff
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All taken into account, (for a good Rhino user) the workflow is like working with a hand tied behind the back. It only feels amazing to people never exposed to Rhino or people not efficient with Rhino to begin with.
Plasticity will add more features as it matures, but at the moment it’s a curiosity, or something to play.
Yeah, I did not like Plasticity at all, I must confess… (sorry, bit of rambling video which is probably boring to most).
Sure but the credit goes to other people. See so many plugin developers in the Rhino world are „only“ interfacing to mature software. While those who really invent new technologies are receiving one shitstorm after the other…
Plasticity 2024.1 is out today.
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Damn looks like they have actually working fillets. Did science go too far?
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If Leonardo were alive today… 
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How clean is that UI! 
As I think, being a polymath, Leonardo would have rejected the current patching, filleting, and blending, reverse engineered the Rhino code in assembly, derived a whole new method of filleting and blending, forked the code; then made Cyberstrak part of the natural workflow… 4 versions ago.
I’d imagine he’d render in Flair as well, all of the time.
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Plasticity is leapfrogging Rhino in that regard because they build on top of Parasolid. The science is already done for them. The interesting thing is that even accounting for the licensing fees to siemens NX, the package is still $150.
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It is entirely possible and plausible that Plasticity currently is very far from break-even financially. They may have an investor who provides significant financial backing and does not require a near term profit. They probably currently do not pay the standard license fee for the Parasolid kernel to Siemens, and similar for XNurbs.
Perhaps Siemens is using Plasticity as a way to explore and enter the lower cost design software market.
BTW, the $150 license is for the older, limited version of Plasticity which does not include the recent enhancements. Those require a $300 license fee. Still low cost.
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Do I sense, (you mean or anticipate), that their current price is a bait and switch and that at some point it will jump into the thousands per seat ?
The way I see it there is no older version. It’s their tier model. One has xNurbs and access to beta testing, the other doesn’t.
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If your bluster is good enough, and it solves many problems like workflow, flexibility and is remarkably able; then an investor or even shareholders will accept a loss-making approach for a few years. Tesla being a more recent example.
That video alone looks properly flashy, smooth, and has a good demonstration of good UI. That really matters when trying to get a good initial userbase. It also integrates/bridges directly to Blender as standard, out of the box. As much as people think Blender is a toy; it’s probably a good flashy selling point, as then you presumably get good access to cycles immediately.
You’re right about this, I was just searching the Plasticity Discord for something I recall Nick writing, and I came across this message from him:
“We have differing functionality on Indie and Studio, there is nothing new about that. XNurbs is a premium product that we are licensing from a third party company. It is not possible to offer it on the indie license” Source
So, yes, different tiers with different features.
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hmm, on another note, some people are not happy in that thread. They feel he switched terms on them.
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Yeah, I can see both sides of it to be honest. It’s definitely annoying for the customer who feels mislead, but also as the businessman who wants to profit off of the very good value they offer.
Never thought I would be invested in a CAD-kernel-software-package drama but here we are 
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A posed a question bluntly on the Plasticity forum and Nick responded directly only a few moments ago.
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What’s silly is that so much of the workflow potential has been demonstrated in Rhino. Old UI approach aside, Push/Pull is wonderful, and I really enjoy how it works.
I got excited about additional modelling flow when I saw FilletSrftoRail, and started using it… and then, nothing. Nothing else happened! It’s a fantastic feature that isn’t backed by the rest of the filleting functions!
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Their whole “CAD for artists” thing is ridiculous – imo. It just make no sense, to say the least.
Purposely falling short on things like 3D mouse navigation compatibility and ‘constraint’ based parametrics while simultaneously offering parasolid – just makes absolutely no sense.
Those philosophies will be bulldozed in the future when AI gets more mainstream and patents expire.
And if companies like autodesk etc. continue their endless fees etc ,and companies like microsoft get evermore invasion thirsty of privacy, then ppl will just start becoming software developers and antiquate them.
They think giving us no choice is a smart strategy. windows 11 is out of control.
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Do you have experience in modeling hard-surface assets for VFX in mesh modeling programs? Don’t you think NURBS modeling approach doesn’t have the same overhead as while modeling using meshes?
Not in terms of ‘hard-surface assets’ for ‘VFX’, but I am very familiar with meshes in other ways.
Yes NURBS format takes much less computer resources than the ‘textures sometimes applied to meshes’.
But it all depends. I think some users get very carried away with ‘textures’, and maybe it’s the “artists” that will tend to do this like in video games or simulations …
What I noticed in reverse engineering and dealing with meshes, is that the data associated with capturing ‘textures’ was the worse thing relative to the consumption of computer resources.
Due to the priority of the work I’ve done over the years with meshes, I actually had zero need so far with the need for “textures” so I basically use zero texture – none nada zilch.
But for an artist, I can see the issue there. However, I do believe some users still apply texture to NURBS, and I’ve dabbled in that a bit. Maybe, the render mesh is associated with that though.
Nurbs calculations would be infinite or something if it wasn’t for the ‘render mesh’ 