neurofuzzy, flash game development, rich internet applications, free source code – *alt.neurotica.fuzzy*

Teddy is a freeform 3d drawing program written in Java, way back in 1999 by Takeo Igarashi, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo.  It’s quite an amazing little program.  You can draw outlines and shapes, cutting and extruding as naturally as modeling clay.  When you draw profiles, the wide areas become thick, and the narrow areas become thin.  This allows you to draw natural organic shapes.  What makes the program really beautiful is the way the program represents the 3d shapes as hatched sketches.  You can download the program and run it on PC or Mac, and save your creations in Alias Wavefront OBJ format.

I gave it a try on my PC, and it works great.  Make sure you run the JAR file, and not the BAT file.  You must right-click and drag to rotate your object around.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get that to work on my Mac.  I’ll need to try it with my Wacom tablet plugged in.

Here’s a 5-minute demo, by the creator himself (via lazyrussian):

Igarashi has created a newer version, called “SmoothTeddy”, which has a nicer interface, better smoothing algorithms, and heirarchical linked structures. It also includes his 3d painting application called “Chameleon”, that allows you to paint colors on your Teddy shapes. (It reminds me of the now defunct Painter3d.) I kind of like the original Teddy better, just because of its simplicity and the way it renders.

I was able to import my model into 3d Studio VIZ using this OBJ2MAX plugin.  It came in perfectly, although I needed to set the vertex scaling to 1.0 because the default brings the object in too small to see.

This program brings to mind another neat little app I played with a while back called Pepakura Designer.  It would allow you to load 3ds files (3d Studio models) and it would ‘unwrap’ them and print them out flat on your printer – complete with numbered tabs – that you could then cut out and refold into a real 3d model.  Organic models like the ones created in Teddy would be far too complex to create foldable models from, though.