curve-first 3D modeling, for beginners
9-bitpoints — a curve-first 3D modeling room for beginning design students, with three complexity levels that grow with you. The next-gen line of ALYUS — a museum room next door — with modern math under period chrome.
network operation · auto-orbit · exported from the app
Points is a teaching tool. A student draws a single Bézier curve in the left view and watches a surface emerge in the right view — revolved, extruded, swept, lofted, or built as a curve network, depending on which operation is set. The 3D view auto-orbits so the user never has to learn pan / orbit / dolly to see their form, though a click-and-drag tilts the camera manually when they want a different angle.
The curve and its relationship to a procedural form is the dynamic. Everything else recedes — the dithered field behind it, the period-amber handles, the workstation-green chrome — so the wet cyan-and-magenta line in the middle of the canvas is the only place attention has to go. That is also the pedagogy: a curve is enough.
The math is cubic Bézier — the same pen-tool curve any design student already touches in Illustrator or Figma. No NURBS, no knots, no weights. Add anchors with + PT, remove them with − PT, drag handles to shape, switch the operation, watch the surface rebuild. When it looks right, export the result as a real quad-mesh OBJ.
Each operation takes one or more Bézier curves and turns them into a quad surface — a uniform u,v grid that exports as real quads, not triangulated. Any curve can be made periodic (closed into a loop) with one click; cap emission auto-suppresses on the closed boundaries.
Every operation supports live thicken: a slider that gives the surface material thickness, offset along the true surface normal at every vertex so the wall stays perpendicular, with the open ends automatically capped. A second smooth / fillet slider relaxes the mesh — a global fillet you can dial to round sharp edges. The result is a closed shell ready for downstream subdivision modeling or 3D printing.
Five worked presets — Face, Banana, Cabriole Leg, Boat Hull, Shell — span all of these. Each starts as straight lines and animates into its form, so a student watches the construction happen before touching anything.
Anchors come in two flavors: SMOOTH (antiparallel tangent handles, the curve flows through them) and CORNER (zero handles, the curve cusps). Two tool buttons toggle a clicked anchor to either state — useful especially on PERIODIC join endpoints, which start as a straight chord and want to be smoothed.
Export uses real quad faces (f a b c d), not split triangles. Filenames roll from a wordbank that brackets the era this app is in dialogue with — new wave electronics on one side (modular, oscillator, vocoder, telex, lacquer, mirrorball, vinyl, polyester) and observational astronomy on the other (syzygy, parallax, perihelion, ephemeris, pulsar, andromeda, vega, betelgeuse, chondrite, planetoid, with named observers messier, herschel, hubble, kepler, cassini, schiaparelli).
The Datatrace menu loads five real-world data sources directly into the active curve, each pre-baked with smooth Catmull-Rom-to-Bézier handles and immediately editable:
The 3D view has five render modes, each addressing a different question about the surface:
CARDINAL is the on-surface sculpt — a toggle now, not a sixth mode. Switch it on over any render and a control grid of wet cyan-and-magenta dots settles on the surface, on a U × V grid independent of the mesh resolution. Drag a dot and the surface pushes or pulls along its local normal with Gaussian falloff into the neighbors; shift-click to gather several and move them together. Two panel sliders set the count, and the sculpt carries across a count change rather than resetting.
Alias/1 was an animation system as much as it was a modeler — the Animate menu carries that history forward. Set keyframes that capture the full editable state (curves, periodic flags, cardinal sculpt), then play to cycle-loop between them with cosine-eased interpolation. Switching operation auto-clears keys; mismatched topology toasts an error rather than guessing.
Export Video hands you 3 s / 10 s / full-cycle .mp4 files (H.264, QuickTime-compatible without conversion; WebM fallback on older browsers). The 1985 equivalent was a physical film recorder writing 35 mm — same gesture, different century.
Two ways to author live in the same room now. CURVE is everything above — draw the profile, the surface follows. NDZ is a node-and-wire graph that builds the same geometry the other way: you wire modules together — profile into revolve into divide into attractor into instance — and the whole chain re-settles the instant you change any value. No run button. The CURVE | NDZ switch (top-right, or View ▸ NDZ) moves between them. It's the same kernel underneath — a Revolve node is the surface builder, and the OBJ that leaves is the same real quads.
The graph isn't just a second way to draw the same thing — it stages two ideas the direct tools can't. The field: an Attractor is a thing in space with a visible reach; every divided point reads its own value off it, and every instance is sized and coloured by what it read. Drag the attractor and the whole population breathes. Vectors come free: Divide hands back the surface normal at every point, so shapes can stand off the surface without anyone building a vector by hand — and an Aim node swings the whole field to face a target.
The palette reads top-to-bottom: construct above (Profile, Trace, Revolve, Extrude, Loft, Sweep), extract below (Divide, Attractor, Series, Remap, Aim, Instance). Drag a header to move a node, drag a port into a port to wire, click a wire to cut. Click any node and the geometry it controls lights up cyan in the 3D view. It's a sibling to the node room in Classicery, the suite next door — the same node-and-wire idea, here driving real surfaces.
points is dressed in 8-bit chrome — phosphor-dark workstation palette, bitmap typography, dithered shading, no gradients. Period-correct to within a half-decade of the IRIS workstations that ran the original Alias/1 in 1985. The 8 bits are the museum.
The 9th bit is the live curve. While the student is editing it, the curve glows full-saturation cyan-and-magenta against the period palette, with anchors that pulse wet under a halo. It is the only place the present day shows up on screen.
The 9-bit conceit wanted to be more than a costume, so points was ported backward — off the web entirely, onto the hardware the look is borrowed from. It now runs as a native application on a clamshell iBook G3: once under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and once in the Classic Mac OS underneath it. Same curve-first idea, rebuilt for machines a quarter-century old.
The Tiger build is a real native app — a Cocoa window around an OpenGL viewport, so the surface is drawn on the actual GPU instead of interpreted in software. The Classic build is a true Toolbox application — no browser, no web view — with a floating Controls palette and menu-driven everything, the way a 1999 program was meant to be driven. Neither is something you'd download; they are built for hardware most people no longer have. They exist to prove the curve survives the trip back.
points sits between two adjacent rooms in the suite.
The Classicery clean-room recreation of Alias/1, a 1985 3D surfacing program that shipped on the IRIS 2400. Cardinal-spline profile editor, four-viewport canvas, paint + animation + render + film-recorder all in one suite. points borrows the chrome and the curve-first instinct; ALYUS keeps the period UI faithful.
visit ALYUS →A small suite of plugins for Rhino — the contemporary descendant of the Alias surfacing approach. Where points teaches with cubic Bézier and a single browser tab, Plug Innery does production NURBS work for the practitioner who already knows the math. Different generation, same curve.
visit Plug Innery →A museum, a teaching room, a working room. The student walks the hallway between them.