Blender: Beyond Mouse and Keyboard

arjonagelhout

I'm building my own polygon modeling app for iOS as a side-project [0], so I feel a bit conflicted.

Getting fully featured Blender on the iPad will be amazing for things like Grease Pencil (drawing in 3D) or texture painting, but on the other hand my side-project just became a little bit less relevant.

I'll have to take a look at whether I can make some contributions to Blender.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/shapereality-3d-modeling/id674...

Fwirt

There’s also the excellent Nomad Sculpt, which while not a mesh editor, is an incredibly performant digital sculpting app. Compared to Blender’s sculpt workflow it maintains a higher frame rate and smaller memory footprint with a higher vertex count. Of course it’s much more limited than Blender but its sculpting workflow is much better and then you can export to Blender.

There is room for more than one modeling app on iOS as long as you can offer something that Blender doesn’t, even if it’s just better performance.

Daub

One thing Blender lacks is easy 3D texture painting. As far as I know, neither is there a decent 3D texture painting iPad app. Definitely a gap in the market.

martin_henk

The concept of a pen tablet friendly 3d modelling app was pioneered by an indie dev many years ago: https://moi3d.com/

henriquegodoy

Speaking of interfaces, when will we have one that works just by thinking—something less intrusive than Neuralink—that lets us control not just Blender, but the entire computer? I think my productivity would increase a lot...

yoz-y

I worked in non invasive BCIs for a couple of years (this was about 7 years ago). My current horizon estimation for a “put a helmet and gave usable brain computer interface” is never.

With implants, we are probably decades away.

What currently works best is monitoring the motor cortex with implants as those signals are relatively simple to decode (and from what I recall we start to be able to get pretty fine control). Anything tied to higher level thought is far away.

As for thought itself, I wonder how would we go about it (assuming we manage to decode it). It’s akin to making a voice controller interface, except you have to tell aloud everything you are thinking.

mkaic

Have you kept up with recent ML papers like MindEye, which have managed to reconstruct seen images using image generator models conditioned on fMRI signals?

Ever since that paper came out, I (someone who works in ML but have no neuroimaging expertise) have been really excited for the future of noninvasive BCU.

Would also be curious to know if you have any thoughts on the several start-ups working in parallel on optimally pumped magnetometers for portable MEG helmets.

mathnode

This is excellent news. So many artists are now using procreate on iPad Pros as their primary platform. I do not miss the days of using puppet to juggle the configs of various overly expensive and user hostile dcc software. The barrier to entry used to be so high for designers.

Daub

I teach digital painting, and Procreate is slowly becoming my enemy. I fully appreciate its ease of use, its fantastic union with Apple Pen and certainly my students love it. But doing design/creative work on a small screen is not healthy, especially for complex images. neither is it easy to maintain a complex workflow, such as that required by matt painting and multi-layer compositing. Also, any presence of tablets in a design teaching lab is never pretty... I can't easily review their files or integrate their output into a pro desktop app.

cosmic_cheese

Cost is likely another big reason it’s popular with students. A $13 one time purchase is hard to beat… even with edu pricing Adobe CC quickly gets more expensive. Clip Studio Paint falls somewhere in the middle.

qntmfred

was expecting this to be voice control. guess vibe blending will have to wait.

password4321

Show HN: MCP server for Blender that builds 3D scenes via natural language

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622374 (2025-07-20; 62 comments)

Probably a useless submission but the discussion linked to the real thing at https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp

WorldPeas

I know this is the classic eye-roll question, but is support planned for linux/desktop devices? I imagine the future android app could be used via waydroid but seeing how VLC could bridge the gap, perhaps?

dagmx

I’m not sure I understand your question. Blender is already available on Desktop Linux.

Are you looking to use Blender on a small touch screen backed by desktop Linux?

WillAdams

I will note that a Wacom One gen 1 screen/graphics tablet worked perfectly on a Raspberry Pi 4 when I tested it ages ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wacom/comments/16215v6/wacom_one_ge...

Looking into using the new gen 2 w/ touch on an rPi 5.

WorldPeas

I have a small touchscreen linux device I use to view HN via 4g, it is a umpc laptop from donki called the nanote next, using the giant blender interface would be greatly enriched on that tiny device if I were to use an android experience.

dagmx

In theory yes, you should be able to use this new simplified interface. It may require compiling blender yourself perhaps