curve-first 3D modeling, for beginners
9-bitA 3D modeling room for beginner design students. The working fork of ALYUS — a museum room next door — with modern math under period chrome.
specimen: hither · quad-mesh revolve · drag to tilt
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, or lofted into 3D, 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 two Bézier curves and turns them into a quad surface — a uniform u,v grid that exports as real quads, not triangulated.
Every operation supports live thicken: a slider that gives the surface material thickness by offsetting the profile along its 2D normal, with the open ends automatically capped. Result is a closed shell ready for downstream subdivision modeling or 3D printing.
Export uses real quad faces (f a b c d), not split triangles. Filename rolls a fresh specimen tag from a wordbank of early 3D CS literature — pioneers (coons, bezier, casteljau, gordon, gouraud, phong, blinn, whitted, newell, catmull, sutherland, lambert), surfacing vocabulary (spline, patch, knot, sweep, loft, skin, manifold), and the Utah teapot.
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.
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.