Blockbench – A low-poly 3D model editor (opens in new tab)

I watched this and the workflow looks identical to blender. I don't see the benefit over just using blender.

I teach Blender. UV unwrapping is something the students have a lot of trouble with.

For those that don’t know, UV-less painting is usually vertex painting, where each vertex is assigned a color. In this way the resolution of the outcome is dependent on that of the model.

In the case of this app, a UV map is generated, but seems to be quite crude. Two options are presented: per-face and box. I assume box is derived from tri-planar projection. If so, then I assume that it would be impossible to assign a color to anything that is invisible to the projection, such as underhangs. I will play with it and see.

I had high hopes for Sprytile, but it seems to have not kept up with the 3.x transition. https://jeiel.itch.io/sprytile

Love to see a link to your plugin!

It's usually called "Nearest Neighbour"!

“Pixel art 3D” is often used as well..

I've only played around with it for a few minutes, but if I wanted to quickly produce a bunch of low poly assets in this style I'd be tempted to go with this and then import them into Blender. This is because it is set up for the low poly workflow out of the box, whereas you'd have to do a bit of faffing around with shaders etc. to get good looking results in Blender. And I say that as someone who has been using Blender for more than a decade. Being forced to work within the constraints that a tool like this imposes is often a good thing from an artist's point of view, as it reduces the decision space down and allows you to focus on the outcome rather than the tool.

Judging by the gallery, this makes a tradeoff giving you automatic consistent-density UV mapping in exchange for being bad at organic shapes. I assume rectangles/boxes are a big part of the tooling.

As someone familiar with Blender, Sprytile looks great, but it also looks as though there hasn’t been a release since 2020. Anyone know if this project is still alive?

The fact that you don’t need to UV unwrap is something that “can’t be done” in Blender. Though I guess technically the same results can definitely be reached :)

Assuming you missed it, blockbench is available in-browser: https://web.blockbench.net/

There's even session sharing! File > Edit Sharing...

SketchUp Free is easy and good for low-medium poly modelling.

Same - personally it feels so much more intuitive than a Wacom. The new pen proximity animation is really nice.

Web-app makes it better. You can still download it to run offline, but you can run the browser version without trusting the binaries to be safe, and you can also get it up and running really fast if you switch computers or need someone else to check it out.

And unsurprisingly the downloadable version uses Electron.

That’s a pretty uncharitable thing to say. A tool like this makes modelling approachable for people who might not have any experience - including kids. Trying to reproduce in Blender, for example, the workflows that this tool easily enables is loads more work - potentially months of learning.