Curvy 3D vs Instant Meshes

Curvy 3D is a Windows sketch-based sculpting program aimed at first-time 3D artists. Users draw profiles and curves to make rounded or organic forms, then refine surfaces with Inflate, Deflate, Pinch, Smooth and Flatten warp brushes. Adaptive subdivision adds mesh detail where needed while controlling triangle counts. The program supports manual retopology, multiresolution sculpting and voxel sculpting. Texture tools paint color, specular and bump maps in 3D views or on 2D textures. Image Inflate converts silhouettes or greyscale images into 3D models using heightmap, bubble, bevel or extrude styles. Models export as OBJ for rendering or animation in software such as Blender. The maker also describes use with Blender or Bryce and importing characters from Poser or Daz. Curvy 3D 5 is listed for Microsoft Windows and requires a DirectX 8.0-compatible 3D graphics card. Aartform offers a free 30-day demo; the Curvy 3D 5 plan is a one-time purchase with price varying by location. Aartform describes itself as an independent London game development studio founded in 2003, and directs questions to its forum.

Instant Meshes is free, open-source software for interactive field-aligned mesh generation, available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its standard workflow solves an orientation field and then a position field before mesh export becomes available. Users can adjust fields with brush tools and inspect input meshes, computed fields, and output meshes in the Advanced panel. Its command-line interface includes controls for thread count, output face or vertex count, edge scale, symmetry types, and point-cloud neighbor count. The project provides precompiled 64-bit Intel binaries for the listed desktop systems. Linux use requires zenity. The dataset panel also requires downloading a dataset ZIP and keeping its datasets folder beside the application. Building from source requires CMake, plus Xcode on Mac, Visual Studio 2015 on Windows, or GCC on Linux. The software originated as part of a publication presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2015. Its license permits redistribution and use of source and binaries subject to listed conditions, and the repository provides an Issues page for discussion.