As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool (the only things I've been successful w/ are programmatic, so OpenSCAD and its ilk), this is _very_ interesting to me.
(given that I shelled out for the _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ 'cause it had Version 1.1 prominently on the cover but the instructions have one download "v1.0 or later" and all the screen grabs are for 1.0 and the wiki is replete with pages tagged "This page needs to be updated for 1.1" or words to that effect).
I've been working on documenting a 2D program (for my employer and as part of a side project): https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
This could be neat for schools and absolute beginners I guess. But I think the "basic shapes + booleans" workflow is going to be much more annoying than "sketch + extrude" that you see in almost every other parametric CAD program.
To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.
OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.
Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).
As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool (the only things I've been successful w/ are programmatic, so OpenSCAD and its ilk), this is _very_ interesting to me.
I am esp. grateful for:
https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/d...
(given that I shelled out for the _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ 'cause it had Version 1.1 prominently on the cover but the instructions have one download "v1.0 or later" and all the screen grabs are for 1.0 and the wiki is replete with pages tagged "This page needs to be updated for 1.1" or words to that effect).
I've been working on documenting a 2D program (for my employer and as part of a side project): https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
This is seriously impressive. You can tell how much thought and intention went into the philosophy behind it
Thank you so much!
This could be neat for schools and absolute beginners I guess. But I think the "basic shapes + booleans" workflow is going to be much more annoying than "sketch + extrude" that you see in almost every other parametric CAD program.
Agree!
Sketching 2D shapes is a very natural way to start thinking about shapes.
That's why there is a sketch + extrude.
Here are few examples - 42 seconds to a desk organizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX6g5slTdeE
Or quick wavy vase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkhAUhlg81s
The booleans and extrusion shapes are complements - both fitting different type of modeling.
Booleans are not only about shaping but also about composing individual parts to more complex assemblies.
So one can extrude few parts, then eg. combine them with a join.
Ooo that is quite impressive. You should import SovleSpace's sketcher!
What CAD kernel are you using? OpenCASCADE?
Thank you!
The CAD kernel is written by me apart from the boolean solver for the meshes which is the superb https://github.com/elalish/manifold
To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.
OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.
Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).
damn interesting