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I’ve been very excited for a while to do a plugin review on this plugin. It’s a plugin designed to subdivide faces to create organic models. This week’s plugin of the week is SubD!

Where can you find it?

You can download this plugin by clicking the link below

Tool Functions

Basically, the way this plugin works is by taking your geometry in your model and subdividing it to create more rounded, organic shapes. For example, if I take a a square face like the one in the image below, then subdivide it, it will continually divide the shapes until you have a smooth curve. It’s basically the equivalent of taking a circle with 12 segments around the perimeter and making it a circle with 24 segments. This makes the circle look much more smooth and organic. However, this process affects models in 3 Dimensions. This tool stores your original geometry, allowing you to go back and adjust your geometry for future changes. It’s important to note that this tool is optimized to work with quad faces, not tri faces. What that means is usually, when SketchUp breaks a face up into multiple pieces, it breaks it into 3 sided pieces. However, in this case, for things to function optimally, you’ll need to model all your faces in quads, or 4 sided faces. This can be greatly helped by using Vertex Tools (also by Thom Thom). It also comes with a couple other tools optimized to help you with working with models. The first is the crease tool. The create tool allows you to adjust points and lines in your model. The second is the quad push pull tool. This tool is designed to help you push pull faces without creating internal geometry that will make the plugin not function properly.    

Ratings

Usefulness/Functionality – 4/5

Overall, this tool is designed to do one thing – subdivide shapes to make them more organic. It’s very good at this, but it’s a little frustrating because to really use this plugin to its potential, you need to model in quads, and the best way to do that is purchase vertex tools.

Value – 4/5

This plugin is great for subdividing shapes, but it’s very difficult to use by itself. To truly use it to its full potential, you have to use quad based modeling, which can be tricky to do without a couple other plugins (vertex tools, QuadFace tools) as well. It would be nice if all this functionality was rolled into a single plugin.

Ease of Use/Documentation – 4/5

Generally speaking, there is a fair amount of documentation about how this extension works on Thom Thom’s website. In addition, when you install this extension, you are immediately linked to the user manual for the software. However, the tricky piece of learning to use this extension is learning to model in quads instead of in tri’s. This requires a fairly high level knowledge of modeling techniques, which makes working with this program tricky. Overall score – 12/15. Overall This plugin can really take your organic modeling to the next level. However, to truly unlock its potential, you’re really going to want to have a copy of Vertex tools as well, which is another $40. This isn’t a bad thing, as vertex tools is THE premier vertex editing extension in SketchUp, but it will still run your cost up to turn SketchUp into a complete organic modeling suite. That being said, the potential of what this extension allows you to do is staggering. It allows you to draw a blocky outline of a shape, then subdivide it into a beautiful organic model.