Plasticity 26.1.3

Plasticity

A Mac-friendly NURBS solid and surface modeler pitched as “CAD for artists”—direct editing, strong fillets, and surfacing without a history-tree subscription workflow.

How modeling works day to day

You sketch curves, build solids and sheets, then push and pull faces with direct-editing tools rather than managing a fragile feature tree. Typical Mac use is concept vehicles, props, product forms, and hard-surface game or industrial shapes: boolean solids, curvature-aware fillets, construction planes, dimensions, and export into pipelines such as Blender (via the Blender bridge), game engines, or other CAD via STEP/Parasolid and mesh formats. Studio-tier tools expand advanced solids/surfacing, IGES/ACIS and Rhino import paths, xNURBS blending on Mac/Windows, and mesh-to-NURBS conversion.

The 2026.1 feature line (versioned as 26.1.x in installers) adds Export Hidden Line for technical SVG drawings, a Slot command for closed slot profiles from open curves, and—Studio only—PolySplines for converting meshes into G2-continuous editable NURBS. Everyday commands gained Tab numeric input on shared gizmos (Move, Rotate, Scale, Extrude, and related), higher copy precision, OBJ/STL export unit controls, Outliner search, construction-plane 2D snapping, and macOS Finder thumbnail previews. SpaceMouse and preference polish round out the session feel for long modeling days.

Licensing, Mac requirements, and 26.1.3

Licenses are perpetual and node-locked: Indie (~$175, up to two machines, essential tools and common CAD/mesh I/O) and Studio (~$299, up to four machines, advanced tools including PolySplines/xNURBS). Each purchase includes about 12 months of version updates; builds obtained in that window remain usable afterward. A 30-day non-commercial trial is available. Official support lists macOS 12+ with separate Intel and Apple Silicon downloads; Homebrew currently tracks 26.1.3 and requires macOS 12+. Build 26.1.3 (April 2026 GitHub release) provides Mac zip packages but no separate public patch changelog—treat it as the 2026.1 maintenance/installer build of that feature set. Plasticity suits designers who want precise CAD geometry with an artist-paced UI; it is less ideal if you need full multi-user PDM or Windows-only DXF/DWG import as a daily requirement.