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Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

solvespace.com

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Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#11

Post by yangcheng »

ponyous wrote: post #7

Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them! [0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com

I have tried OpenSCAD, it seems very slow to compile to display on web. are you using the official wasm or some other ways?

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#12

Post by ur-whale »

ponyous wrote: post #7

Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them! [0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com

> I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice

As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.

All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.

That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.

For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:

   - Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based

   - Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces

   - Trimming surfaces

   - Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)

   - Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
I might have misunderstood what you're looking to do, but, yeah, digging deeper feels very much like the right thing to do.

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#15

Post by ur-whale »

bhouston wrote: post #4
masonhensley wrote: post #2

I've been using FreeCad more and more, but solvespace has been a great, lightweight tool to design parts for laser cutting by SendCutSend/Oshcut. Neat that they got it working in the browser.

FreeCAD is amazing these days. It has completely replaced my use of Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking projects. It is capable and the UI is understandable. Its feature depth is incredible. FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives. I find the rendering side of things under developed though.

> FreeCAD is amazing these days.

FreeCAD has become much better, no denying it.

"Amazing" is however not the word I would use though, the UI is still very convoluted and very hard to learn.

The worst part in FreeCAD, and which remains true to this day is the load of minutia you need to know to handle/avoid weird corner cases that you inevitable run into when you start building complex models and where FreeCAD stubbornly refuses to let you carry on with your work.

When you paint yourself into one of these corners, the software is hugely unhelpful when it comes to understanding what you did wrong and how to correct it.

In short, the word "Amazing" only works if you compare it to the absolute abomination the UI was a few years back.

But compare FreeCAD today to, for example, how slick Fusion is, there is still a very, very wide gap.

Finally, the geometry engine, is a somewhat old and creaky thing that sometimes downright fails to compute fillets or surface/surface intersections correctly, so yeah, YMMV.

FreeCAD is however, free software, and not controlled by one of the worst corp. in the world of software: Autodesk. So huge thumbs up there.

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#16

Post by lopsotronic »

bhouston wrote: post #4
masonhensley wrote: post #2

I've been using FreeCad more and more, but solvespace has been a great, lightweight tool to design parts for laser cutting by SendCutSend/Oshcut. Neat that they got it working in the browser.

FreeCAD is amazing these days. It has completely replaced my use of Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking projects. It is capable and the UI is understandable. Its feature depth is incredible. FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives. I find the rendering side of things under developed though.

Yeah anything involving 2d art I confess I just send to Blender, even technical illustration, with the exception of O&D style sheets.

The fact anyone got a CAD kernel working in the browser is insane. Parsing the vagaries, vendor cruft, and gaping holes in STEP files has occupied a non-trivial amount of my career.

You want to talk about poisoned specs . . .

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#17

Post by dfox »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #13

Impressive work! Minor nit: why does the rendered in-window text use a really awful pixelated font? It looks like what happens when a font gets rendered onto a pixel grid without any hinting or snapping.

It uses exactly the same font in the desktop version, and is probably entirely intentional.

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#18

Post by mikeayles »

yangcheng wrote: post #11
ponyous wrote: post #7

Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them! [0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com

I have tried OpenSCAD, it seems very slow to compile to display on web. are you using the official wasm or some other ways?

you may find this useful: https://phaestus.app/blog/blog0031

Edit: Forgot I also got doom running in openscad: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/openscad-doom/

and doom running in openscad in the browser at https://doom.mikeayles.com/

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#19

Post by IshKebab »

MrDOS wrote: post #3

SolveSpace is a wonderfully different take on parametric CAD, but development has really slowed, and it seems fundamentally incapable of some pretty rudimentary features (like chamfers[0]). Dune 3D[1] seems like a pretty effective spiritual successor. 0: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/149 1: https://dune3d.org/

FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that.

Re: Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

#20

Post by IshKebab »

ponyous wrote: post #7

Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them! [0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com

Yeah it does. In fact I believe it was written to demonstrate improved sketch constraint solving (there's a 2D version too).

Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.

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