Is anyone doing something in the space for architecture mockups? I was talking with a friend who is an architect and he would love a tool that could iterate designs.
Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#22Was a Mechanical Design Engineer for about a decade. Personally, the CAD part was the easy and fun part (Used Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, Catia v5 extensively. Professionally trained in all four as well). The “tedious” part was SAP (part number and material management), drafting, ECN/R/O, BOM handling, etc. I would be more excited for “AI” for PLM like Windchill, TeamCenter, or Cadedge (or whatever SAP PLM packages y…
Echo this. As an EE fun part is circuit design and the tedious part is SAP and agile. This is where AI needs to be. Parts creation from data sheets, and automatic sync between SAP and Altium/cadence.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#23The plugin does not load with Fusion 2.0.19994
Hi Luastoned,
Can we get your contact info so that we can help diagnose the issue?
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#24I wonder if the prevalence of coding LLMs will bring renewed attention to code-based modeling systems like OpenSCAD. It seems much easier to get them to generate code vs. translating into GUI interactions or modifying some other internal state directly.
I've been wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, I've found that GPT-4o is much less good at OpenSCAD than it is at Python.
It feels totally untrained on the step-by-step logic you need to build things in a programatic way. This is likely a problem with not having enough training data.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#25This doesn't really seem like a copilot, but it's still cool! It reminds me of the plugins for Glyphs [0], which allow font designers to speed up their process.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#26Neat! At first glance, I was a little worried this was a "make me a hinge, Hestus!" sort of AI integration. This seems very logical! Coming from CAD from the purely hobbyist 3D-printing side of things, I'm pretty familiar with the tedium of some operations, (mostly because I can only assume I do most things wrong) so it makes a lot of sense to automate the scripts that would otherwise be an annoying task of "click part A... click arc... click the pivot point... click part B..."
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#27I've been using parametric CAD (Pro/E / Creo, Solidworks, and Onshape) for 30+ years. Automatically adding sketch constraints is nothing new. Just about any 2D sketching tool out there will have some sort of snapping and/or auto-constraint-adding system. What's often more frustrating is fixing things when they get accidentally over-constrained. Solidworks tries to help with this in the form of cycling through what it thinks are the most likely constraints to remove and then re-solving the sketch. It's OK, but that sort of tool could be better.
A number of popular CAD systems use the D-Cubed 2D sketch constraint solver [0]. Siemens owns this and the Parasolid kernel, along with NX. All have been in constant development since the 80's. I really question what major new problems a startup is going to fix in 2D sketching constraints. I'm sure there a bunch of small quality of life things which may be out there, but most of the hard issues are more 3D or spline related, not finding things which could be tangent or equal.
Probably the biggest paradigm shift with constraints that still hasn't really taken off is what Siemens is doing with SolidEdge. It allows for defining the 3D equivalent of constraints between surfaces, holes, edges, etc. and then using direct modeling techniques to modify solids. Perhaps adding more intelligence to that approach would make direct modeling more popular.
Onshape has innovated in the way that it's brought Google Docs-like collaboration and GITHub like versioning, branching and merging to parametric CAD. Nothing else has these capabilities at the moment. To me that has been one of the most innovative changes in the mechanical CAD industry.
Onshape also has FeatureScript, which is the programming language which describes all the parametric features. Right now, none of the LLMs know FeatureScript well enough to be the least bit useful. They hallucinate wildly. I'd be very happy to have a Copilot for FeatureScript.
[0] https://plm.sw.siemens.com/en-US/plm-components/d-cubed/
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#28Was a Mechanical Design Engineer for about a decade. Personally, the CAD part was the easy and fun part (Used Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, Catia v5 extensively. Professionally trained in all four as well). The “tedious” part was SAP (part number and material management), drafting, ECN/R/O, BOM handling, etc. I would be more excited for “AI” for PLM like Windchill, TeamCenter, or Cadedge (or whatever SAP PLM packages y…
What do you do now? Did you switch to software?
Yup, had the opportunity to switch to full time software a couple years back so I jumped at the opportunity.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#29I wonder if the prevalence of coding LLMs will bring renewed attention to code-based modeling systems like OpenSCAD. It seems much easier to get them to generate code vs. translating into GUI interactions or modifying some other internal state directly.
I've been wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, I've found that GPT-4o is much less good at OpenSCAD than it is at Python. It feels totally untrained on the step-by-step logic you need to build things in a programatic way. This is likely a problem with not having enough training data.
Surely all of GitHub is “enough training data”
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#30Nice work!!
I tried to run it, but got an API Error:
Due to some internal changes made to the Fusion API, the Add-In: 'sketch_helper' from 'Hestus, Inc.' cannot be loaded. You need to install a new version of the Add-In that is compatible with this version of Fusion.
Can you just put it up on the Autodesk app store?
I struggle with this model, because of the capture by Autodesk and the other CAD providers. If you read the Autodesk EULA, I think it prohibits use of any open-source software in these add-ins. And I don't think anyone can use this software outside of Fusion 360. And if this add-in becomes popular, Autodesk can trivially release something that has the same functionality, built into Fusion 360 by default. And, as you are no doubt painfully aware, the Fusion API can be limiting.
If you can have your LLM ingest a non-parametric CAD model and spit out a parametric model with a beautiful, complete, editable feature tree full of Extrudes, fully defined parametric sketches with these nice constraints, all tied to the sketch origin, now that's something.
I think Autodesk BIM is $5000/mo/user, Fusion is $500/mo/user. I have thought that means the money is in architectural/structural.
As a side note - one other tip I have, for all CAD users everywhere: avoid Tangent relationship wherever possible! Stick to vertical/horizontal on the lines and arc endpoints, and you will be golden. The Fusion sketch solver is badly compromised, it can't do more than two or so simple successive Tangent relations without bugging out. And, my experience with Solidworks is the same, not sure if this is still true.
Curious if you dealt much with the Fusion constraint model, and have any insights into why it works so poorly, or even how it works? Many times, you click on a line, and it turns from blue to black, and back to blue again.