Plasticity

Plasticity runs on the same Parasolid kernel used inside SolidWorks and NX/Designcenter, but the workflow built on top of it has nothing to do with feature trees or dimensioned sketches: shapes are built by combining and cutting solids with fast, keyboard-driven Boolean operations, using shortcuts borrowed deliberately from Blender rather than from traditional CAD. The result is a tool that produces exact, watertight solid geometry at a speed closer to digital sculpting than to parametric modelling.

It exists specifically to fill the gap between mesh-based sculpting tools, which are fast but produce geometry that is not clean or exact enough for downstream engineering use, and full CAD packages, which are exact but slow for early-stage concept iteration. Both licence tiers — Indie and Studio — are one-time purchases that include a year of updates, run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and can be tried free for 30 days.

Choose Plasticity if your work is concept and product-shape exploration rather than dimensioned engineering documentation — game assets, 3D-printed enclosures, industrial-design concepts — and you want to iterate on hard-surface forms faster than a parametric feature tree allows.

Against Rhino, Plasticity is faster to learn and faster to iterate in, but does not attempt Rhino's depth of surfacing tools or its broader plugin ecosystem. Against a parametric package like Fusion or SolidWorks, Plasticity has no dimension-driven history at all, so a finished model is not the kind of fully rebuildable, dimensioned part this archive's exercises ask for — it belongs to an earlier stage of the design process.