3DTin now has built-in support for sub-surfacing. Take a look at the two images below – first one is a sketch made of pure cubes, second one is the same sketch after applying 3 iterations of smoothing.
Yes, this is the “Secret Feature” that was behind the cheat code for past week.
Behind the scene, 3DTin applies Catmull-Clark subdivision algorithm to tranform your 3D pixel art into smooth shapes. To use it, all you have to do is press a button.
You will now see a new toolbar at the top.
It shows the two editing modes in which 3DTin operates: Cubicle (the cube based traditional interface) and Smooth (a subsurfaced rendering of the sketch). You can toggle between the two modes at any time and you can use all editing operations in either mode.
When in smooth mode, you will see an additional toolbar that will let you adjust the smoothness of your sketch.
Smoothness is how many times the catmull-clark subdivision algorithm is applied. The higher the smoothness, higher will be the number of polygons generated and smoother will be the resulting surface. But note that, with higher smoothness the rendering of sketch will get slower. After a certain limit it may freeze the browser. 3DTin will warn you before crossing a certain polygon count.
This feature runs on both backends: WebGL and Canvas 2D without any visible change. However Canvas 2D will give much slower response at given smoothness than WebGL.
I hope this new feature will give more freedom to your imagination. Try it out and let me know about it.
3DTin 