Prompting for "A robot arm" turns up a blank design ;(
I'd be surprised if a prompt that general would actually yield anything useful.
Text-to-CAD
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Text-to-CAD
#42As someone who has used 3D CAD professionally for decades, I must confess I had low expectations for this tool. My expectations have been greatly exceeded, and there is real value in something like this.
The value is not in creating models of new/custom parts, but in quickly generating models of standard parts such as pipe fittings, bolts, connectors, and stuff you could buy from a catalog. Prompts like "m4 cap screw which is 50 mm long" or "2 inch ASME B16.5 pipe flange" seem to reliably generate adequate results. Design of large assemblies often requires locating or drawing dozens (or hundreds) of such models (though there are sometimes libraries available). It's almost like the model was trained on the entire McMaster-Carr catalog! (maybe they scraped it?) The models will still need to be checked to ensure quality, but this is true regardless of whether a human or AI creates them.
Modeling even simple fixtures and brackets with a system like this is cumbersome: I tried, but requires paragraphs of metes-and-bounds language. Nevertheless I got the parts I wanted. Much of engineering happens at the interfaces, so accurately describing things like hole patterns and mating surfaces is critical. This can certainly be done in text, just not time-efficiently.
Additionally, the output (STEP files, etc) are what we call in the business "dumb solids." They don't include any parametric logic, and the sorts of edits which can be made to them are limited and often require serious creativity.
Another drawback: this thing is slow! A good CAD user could draw a lot of these parts in less wall-clock time. I assume this can be overcome by throwing more iron at the problem.
The UI/UX is has a ton of rough edges (and I'm still not sure if I made an account or not) but is totally fine for a proof-of-concept.
I went into this with incredibly low hopes: I've heard many promises of software which promises to make CAD faster and easier and accessible to non-experts. These look great in sales pitches, but the engineers and designers in the audience invariably wince (or worse). This is something that I could actually use and would make my life easier.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#43Disappointing to see Jessie Frazelle building closed source centralized tech.
This approach mirrors "Open"AI sending all queries to central servers with no mention of any privacy measures. The admins surely get to see who is making sex toys, prop weapons, or medical parts and that data will be sold or leaked, as is tradition.
This is a great idea though and I look forward to supporting whoever makes an open source alternative I can run locally as a Blender, FreeCAD, or OpenSCAD extension.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s trivial to take a 2D image DALLE3 or midjourney generate and vectorize it (illustrator etc.)
If you're getting your engineering plans from Midjourney etc., something is likely to explode.
To be honest from the sample prompts they provide you would be lucky if any two pieces fits together.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're one and the same. We use 3d CAD to generate 2d drawings, that's the standard way 3d cad is used, to generate 2d drawings that let you make stuff. Many people get 3d modeling like for games or computer graphics confused with CAD, which is different. CAD is fundamentally 2d and 3d in nature both, as a function of how we use it to make parts
i've definitely used 2-d cad programs that can't handle 3-d, and 3-d cad programs that are at best anemic for making 2-d drawings they're not one and the same, although some programs are capable enough to do both
Those sound like terrible CAD programs that aren't terribly usable for real work. I don't know how I'd do my job with them.
Proper modern 3d CAD systems like Solidworks, Catia, Creo (was ProE), Fusion360, Inventory, etc. have super robust 2d drawing and export functionality. If they didn't we couldn't make the built world the way we have.
It's the same for 2d packages like Autocad. You can draw in 3d in Autocad, but it's not solid modeling its just drawing in 3d, totally different. But it works.
Why would you use tools that don't work?
Re: Text-to-CAD
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
i've definitely used 2-d cad programs that can't handle 3-d, and 3-d cad programs that are at best anemic for making 2-d drawings they're not one and the same, although some programs are capable enough to do both
That a CAD program can only handle 2D doesn't mean that it doesn't describe 3D. Even when plans where physical large format blueprints, 2D, the product they described was of course always 3D. In French, the draughtsman was called a "dessinateur projeteur" - as projecting the 3D objects to a 2D plane (the plan !) was his core skill.
Exactly, because the end result is a 3d object in the real world that needs to function with its surroundings in 3d space. How we write down that shape to communicate it to eachother doesn't matter so much. It's like language vs content
Re: Text-to-CAD
#47I’ve used ChatGpt to generate OpenSCAD code. Using GPT 4, it does a decent enough job to generate code for a basic shape of something as a starter.
This is the approach I've tried in the past although I'm interested in models that generate an AST that could then be translated back into code.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#48I’ve used ChatGpt to generate OpenSCAD code. Using GPT 4, it does a decent enough job to generate code for a basic shape of something as a starter.
I've also done this (and use github copilot while editing scad files in Emacs). I really wish there were more audio programming languages and examples so that we could create music like this, too.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#49Disappointing to see Jessie Frazelle building closed source centralized tech. This approach mirrors "Open"AI sending all queries to central servers with no mention of any privacy measures. The admins surely get to see who is making sex toys, prop weapons, or medical parts and that data will be sold or leaked, as is tradition. This is a great idea though and I look forward to supporting whoever makes an open source al…
As someone who spent an enormous amount of free time with zero pay contributing to one of those open source cad tools you mentioned, i say good for her. Make that bag. I work in a low level job thats got nothing to do with open source nor with CAD because i spent way too much time waiting for open source to magically produce income. There is a spectrum between open source dreams and pragmatic reality. People who judge you are almost universally wrong in their assumptions and their worldview and listening to them was a waste of time. I hope she makes a million dollars and uses it to support open source projects.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're getting your engineering plans from Midjourney etc., something is likely to explode.
To be honest from the sample prompts they provide you would be lucky if any two pieces fits together.
What is the Architectual equivalent of a hand with twelve fingers and nonsense lettering