Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models • Hacker News Board

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#41

Post by irevdev » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #40

irevdev wrote: post #35

Hey, I created CadHub. I'm really bullish on software driven CAD, myself and other CadHub volunteers talk regularly about a future in which Mechanical Engineering and design is very similar to software engineering. I'll be the first person it admit that some of the current CodeCAD tools aren't production ready, OpenSCAD for example I can't imagine being used by mechanical engineers. So the idea is mostly about unifyi…

Howdy! Well we absolutely need more open source CAD tools. That said as a mechanical engineer for going on two decades now, I really get no value from this kind of mechanical design. I grew up on Solidworks and now use OnShape. That kind of physical modeling is very important. Being able to click on a face and sketch some geometry and then extrude it really feels like the right modality for me. I’d really love to see…

"why not both"

Direct manipulation/GUI will always be faster at producing content. It worth exploring how much the two can we wedded with code synthesis. I get that code synthesis attempts normally produce poor quality code, but maybe a hybrid work flow could work between using the GUI and fixing up code.

It's a shame that the current CodeCAD tools have very little interaction with he part viewer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=290&v=jC2_O5Jh_Rg&feature=yo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF8arSFKI1k

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#42

Post by TaylorAlexander » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

irevdev wrote: post #41

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Howdy! Well we absolutely need more open source CAD tools. That said as a mechanical engineer for going on two decades now, I really get no value from this kind of mechanical design. I grew up on Solidworks and now use OnShape. That kind of physical modeling is very important. Being able to click on a face and sketch some geometry and then extrude it really feels like the right modality for me. I’d really love to see…

"why not both" Direct manipulation/GUI will always be faster at producing content. It worth exploring how much the two can we wedded with code synthesis. I get that code synthesis attempts normally produce poor quality code, but maybe a hybrid work flow could work between using the GUI and fixing up code. It's a shame that the current CodeCAD tools have very little interaction with he part viewer. https://www.youtube…

Maybe both would be fine, I am just saying the code part is much less useful to me than the visual/parametric editor. Onshape for example has scripts which can do things like generate gears and that is great, but I use scripts for less than 0.1% of my onshape work. The visual/parametric component is what users like me really need. I added it late to my comment but here is an example of one of my recent CAD projects.

https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1450001567088713730

I will check out those videos when I get a chance.

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#43

Post by zokier » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

sk2020 wrote: post #17

Programmatically generating geometry is very cool, but I don’t know of anyone doing real work with it. OpenSCAD is probably the best power-hobbyist software I know of for this purpose. AutoDesk seems to be trying this approach with DyanamoBIM, which I’m excited to experiment with (I just don’t get visual programming though). Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profi…

I think the parametric constraint driven way of doing CAD is actually already pretty programmatic. While I'm not sure, I'm imaging that there might be some sort of isomorphism between CAD-style constraints and Prolog-style logic programming...

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#44

Post by amenghra » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

irevdev wrote: post #41

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Howdy! Well we absolutely need more open source CAD tools. That said as a mechanical engineer for going on two decades now, I really get no value from this kind of mechanical design. I grew up on Solidworks and now use OnShape. That kind of physical modeling is very important. Being able to click on a face and sketch some geometry and then extrude it really feels like the right modality for me. I’d really love to see…

"why not both" Direct manipulation/GUI will always be faster at producing content. It worth exploring how much the two can we wedded with code synthesis. I get that code synthesis attempts normally produce poor quality code, but maybe a hybrid work flow could work between using the GUI and fixing up code. It's a shame that the current CodeCAD tools have very little interaction with he part viewer. https://www.youtube…

Onshape is a good combination of visual + you can set exact values for things. I’m always happy to try new tools, but I tend to fallback to Blender for artsy stuff and Onshape for more precise parts.

I suck at 3d modeling, so I evaluate tools from a “how much value can a noob get” point of view.

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#45

Post by mywittyname » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

sk2020 wrote: post #17

Programmatically generating geometry is very cool, but I don’t know of anyone doing real work with it. OpenSCAD is probably the best power-hobbyist software I know of for this purpose. AutoDesk seems to be trying this approach with DyanamoBIM, which I’m excited to experiment with (I just don’t get visual programming though). Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profi…

> Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profit model

I worked on a web-based version of a major player in the industry and the projected ended up getting canned. Ironically, because (I think) they really couldn't figure out a good way to profit from it. A license for the desktop product was like $xx,000, but the ideas tossed around for the web-based version were like $y.00 per minute of instance time (basically like EC2 pricing). Turns out that $y would need to be Very Large to be even remotely profitable.

The product itself was pretty slick though. I was really surprised at how well it performed.

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#46

Post by randomsilence » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

billconan wrote: post #11

ravenstine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that still doesn't really answer my question. I can run OpenSCAD locally and there's never a lag like that when I pan/tilt/zoom the camera. I could understand if that lag occurs in this web app if OpenSCAD wasn't actually running in the browser but instead as an instance on a server, but the page you linked to doesn't state whether that's what's happening. Or maybe it's just an approach to "bake" the model…

there is a web version openscad http://openjscad.azurewebsites.net/

Could this be an older version?

The current version should be:

https://www.openjscad.xyz/

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#47

Post by mywittyname » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #40

irevdev wrote: post #35

Hey, I created CadHub. I'm really bullish on software driven CAD, myself and other CadHub volunteers talk regularly about a future in which Mechanical Engineering and design is very similar to software engineering. I'll be the first person it admit that some of the current CodeCAD tools aren't production ready, OpenSCAD for example I can't imagine being used by mechanical engineers. So the idea is mostly about unifyi…

Howdy! Well we absolutely need more open source CAD tools. That said as a mechanical engineer for going on two decades now, I really get no value from this kind of mechanical design. I grew up on Solidworks and now use OnShape. That kind of physical modeling is very important. Being able to click on a face and sketch some geometry and then extrude it really feels like the right modality for me. I’d really love to see…

From what I've seen, most programmatic integrations comes on the CAE/simulation side of the house. Faces of the part are given specific names/metadata by the designer and a script is used to automatically apply the loads/constraints and run it through the simulation.

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#48

Post by OJFord » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #40

irevdev wrote: post #35

Hey, I created CadHub. I'm really bullish on software driven CAD, myself and other CadHub volunteers talk regularly about a future in which Mechanical Engineering and design is very similar to software engineering. I'll be the first person it admit that some of the current CodeCAD tools aren't production ready, OpenSCAD for example I can't imagine being used by mechanical engineers. So the idea is mostly about unifyi…

Howdy! Well we absolutely need more open source CAD tools. That said as a mechanical engineer for going on two decades now, I really get no value from this kind of mechanical design. I grew up on Solidworks and now use OnShape. That kind of physical modeling is very important. Being able to click on a face and sketch some geometry and then extrude it really feels like the right modality for me. I’d really love to see…

My background is software, I do (mechanical) CAD just for hobby stuff, but I agree about the GUI being a convenient way of working on it.

What I desparately want though is an on-disk format that's plaintext, makes sense, and results in reasonable diffs so that I can use git for version control.

I just don't understand, being familiar with git, how people can work with 'save and mark new version' style 'version control' that's so prevalent among tools that have anything at all.

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#49

Post by cassianoleal » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:29 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I understand the thing about the models not being live previews. Is OpenSCAD effectively being run on the server and the code needs to be sent to it every time you modify code or change the camera?

OpenJSCAD [0] does live camera and the performance is great.

[0] https://openjscad.xyz/

Re: Code CAD – Use code to create CAD models

#50

Post by ur-whale » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

xor99 wrote: post #39

https://www.libfive.com/ Libfive is quite good to check out too but yes openscad and cadquery are the most used.

> Libfive is quite good to check out too

Lots of potential, but IMO not really usable for real world work.

For example, there isn't any (or I haven't found any) simple way to create a clean fillet between two complex surfaces other than blending them and hoping for the best.

Documentation of the API is lacking, except for a bunch of examples in scheme (not exactly the most popular language for CAD folks).

Python API exists, but documentation is ... reading the source code.

Finally, the implicit surface tessellation algos used in libfive are IMO somewhat unpredictable and getting them to produce precise shapes (which is something fairly desirable in mechanical engineering) is hard.