Best Surface Modeling Software

CAD software to design anything—with time-saving toolsets, web, and mobile apps. AutoCAD® is computer-aided design (CAD) software that architects, engineers, and construction professionals rely on to create precise 2D and 3D drawings. Draft, annotate, and design 2D geometry and 3D models with solids, surfaces, and mesh objects. Automate tasks such as comparing drawings, adding blocks, creating schedules, and more. Customize with add-on apps and APIs. AutoCAD includes industry-specific features and intelligent objects for architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical design, and more. Automate floor plans, sections, and elevations. Draw piping, ducting, and circuiting quickly with parts libraries. Auto-generate annotations, layers, schedules, lists, and tables. Use a rules-driven workflow to accurately enforce industry standards.

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now.

Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls.

With a workflow optimized for creativity, unparalleled fillets, sophisticated surface modeling, and the most advanced direct editing tools, Plasticity is the perfect choice for those who demand the best. Plus, with no subscriptions, you own your software. Try it free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself. Plasticity is the ultimate tool for creative professionals in the video game industry, product design, vehicle design, and beyond. Say goodbye to clunky CAD workflows designed for manufacturability. Plasticity offers all the power of NURBS modeling combined with the best workflow innovations from modern polygonal modeling software. This unique combination gives you the flexibility and creativity you need to bring your ideas to life. Plasticity's advanced geometry and fillet engine are second to none, thanks to Parasolid's best-in-class algorithms. With Plasticity, you can create the absolute best fillets, booleans, and offsets, and change them whenever you want.

Rhino can create, edit, analyze, document, render, animate, and translate NURBS curves, surfaces and solids, subdivision geometry (SubD), point clouds, and polygon meshes. There are no limits on complexity, degree, or size beyond those of your hardware. Uninhibited free-form 3D modeling tools like those found only in products costing 20 to 50 times more. Model any shape you can imagine. Accuracy needed to design, prototype, engineer, analyze, and manufacture anything from an airplane to jewelry. Compatibility with all your other design, drafting, CAM, engineering, analysis, rendering, animation, and illustration software. Read and repair meshes and extremely challenging IGES files. Accessible. So easy to learn and use that you can focus on design and visualization without being distracted by the software. Fast, even on an ordinary laptop computer. No special hardware is needed. Development platform for hundreds of specialty 3D products.

Fusion 360 unifies design, engineering, electronics, and manufacturing into a single software platform. Get integrated CAD, CAM, CAE & PCB on a single development platform. Also includes EAGLE Premium, HSMWorks, Team Participant, and access to consumptive services, such as generative design, cloud simulation, and cloud rendering. Engineer products with a comprehensive set of modeling tools. Ensure form, fit, and function of your products with various analysis methods. Create and edit sketches with sketch constraints, dimensions, and a powerful suite of sketch tools. Edit or repair imported geometry from non-native file formats. Make design changes without worrying about time-based features. Create and edit complex parametric surfaces for repairing, patching or designing geometry. Create history-based features, including extrude, revolve, loft, sweep, etc., that update with design changes.

form•Z pro is a powerful 3D design application featuring a variety of modeling personalities and tools with an easy to use interface to express and communicate your imagination. It is based on advanced 3D solid and surface modeling methods that maintain accurate representations as you progress from design to visualization, layout, animation and fabrication. Object Symmetry creates a plane of symmtrey for an object. Subsequent operations to the object maintain symmetry by updaing the opposte sids of the model to match. The symmetry functionality has special consideration for NURBs curves, NURB surfaces and Sub-D objects. Reference Files are simply data from one project displayed inside another project. Reference files allow for complex static data to be mainteined in external files and supports coloboration where files can be shaered between team members as a design evolves. Python is a easy to use yet rich scripting language.

Ideal for 3D site design, stockpile volume calculations, mine surveying, quantity takeoffs, pad and pond design, geological mapping, surface contouring and visualization, and landfill site design. Includes functions for: surveying, coordinate geometry, image manipulation, digital terrain modeling, contouring, volume and earthwork calculations, design, grading, visualization and report generation. Create surface models from large LiDAR and UAV datasets. Have complete control over your point data thinning functionality. Thinning to polygons, corridors, coordinates regions, or exterior regions. Import and management of a variety of survey and file formats, including: total station, LiDAR, ASCII, DWG, DGN, USGS DEM, LandXMl and image formats (TIFF, BMP, JPG). Total station data can be included with automatic control of linear features, breaklines and symbology. Import georeferenced background imagery from our Live Maps tool.

3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control. Create massive worlds in games. Visualize high-quality architectural renderings. Model finely detailed interiors and objects. Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX. The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects. Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image. Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls. Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster. 3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity. Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production. Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs.

3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.

3DCoat is the one application that has all the tools you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured organic or hard surface model. Today 3DCoat is available to learn at 300+ Universities, colleges and schools worldwide. 3DCoat is one of the most advanced software applications for creating detailed 3D models. Where other applications in this market segment tend to specialize in one specific task, such as Digital Sculpting or Texture Painting, 3DCoat provides High-End capability across multiple tasks in an asset creation pipeline. These include Sculpting, Retopology, UV Editing , PBR Texture Painting and Rendering. So it can be called a 3D texturing software and 3D texture painting software and 3D sculpting program and Retopology software and UV mapping software and 3D rendering software all combined. In short, 3DCoat removes the need to purchase (and learn) multiple specialty software titles.

ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination. Designed around a principle of circularity, the menus in ZBrush work together in a non-linear and mode-free method. This facilitates the interaction of 3D models, 2D images and 2.5D Pixols in new and unique ways. ZBrush gives you all of the tools needed to quickly sketch out a 2D or 3D concept and then take that idea all the way to completion. You can create realistic renders directly in ZBrush with lighting and atmospheric effects.

Imagine, design, create, and innovate your products better with Creo, 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software, and solutions for product design and development. Now, more than ever, product design and manufacturing teams are expected to create products more efficiently and cost effectively, without sacrificing innovation or quality. Fortunately, Creo delivers the most scalable range of 3D CAD product development packages and tools in today’s market. Creo 7.0 has breakthrough innovations in the areas of generative design, real-time simulation, multibody design, additive manufacturing, and others! Take your products from concept to digital prototype efficiently, precisely, and intuitively with Creo—on the cutting edge of CAD for more than 30 years. With Creo 7.0, PTC amply demonstrates its skill at adding compelling new features to an already robust tool-set using smart partnerships to extend its capabilities even further.

The 3D modeler with the fastest, fully integrated ray-tracer. Because "rasterization is so 20th century™" 3D modeling, animation, photorealistic rendering, photorealistic VR content creation, CAD/CAM, 3D printing, laser-cutting and much more! Why is EQUINOX-3D better? As our artist said: "all engineers should be forced to use the software they write". I use EQX many hours a day and there is no need to force me! Super-fast photorealistic renderer, the first fully integrated interactive ray-tracer in a modeler. You can do full editing/modeling on ray-traced windows! Powerful subdivision surface modeling. Powerful CAD/CAM features, 3D printing and laser-cutting support. Universal rendering API that allows full modeling on any renderer and fully integrated Cg renderer with a quality that closely matches the ray-tracer. HDR texture support and HDR rendering output. Super fast importance-sampled HDR environment light support.