51–60 of 135 posts
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/
Here's my take on CAD in the browser! https://vcad.io I implemented a full kernel in rust and compile it to wasm https://github.com/ecto/vcad
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>> I'm curious why you didn't go with OCCT for Solvespace. I didn't start Solvespace, but Jonathan was apparently in a DIY mode after developing his take on constraint-based sketching. It's also very easy to go from NURBS curves to NURBS surfaces, the challenge begins at boolean operations which continue to be a source of bugs for us. This is really the only option other than OCCT and the code is small and approachab…
Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT (or make it optional)? It would make certain things such as fillets/chamfers much easier, I suppose, and it would make those boolean operation bugs go away. And exporting to various formats would be easy.
It would, and it has been considered. The sketch elements in solvespace are significantly decoupled from the solid model. That means we could substitute (via wrapper maybe) an OCCT object instead of our SShell class. Then you'd have to change a set of solvespace curves to OCCT curves to make extrusions from them and such. But that would be most of the work.
We do tag all triangles in the mesh with a sketch entity handle for flat surfaces so you can constrain points to a face. I'm not sure how that would be handled. We will also be tagging edges of the solid with sketch entity handles in the future so we can do chamfers and fillets - say by selecting a line entity and applying a modifier to it which gets applied to the NURBS shell. I'm not sure how that would go with OCCT.
But yes I've given a bit of thought to it ;-)
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Chamfers and Fillets are my next major undertaking. Don't expect them any time soon, but they've moved to the top of my list. They are extremely difficult to do in the general case - so we will not cover all cases. Several years ago I tried an experiment: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/453#issuecom... That could only do the top or bottom of a straight extrusion. This time will be a more general than…
Oh, sorry, I didn't recognize that this had been posted by a SolveSpace maintainer! Rad. I am glad to hear the project is still moving. I also appreciate the difficulty of generalizing chamfers/fillets. There's a reason that basically all FOSS CAD packages have struggled with it.
Could you decompile CAD, run it through an LLM, and call it a day?
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using BOSL2 alleviates most issues I've run into with OpenScad for chamfers and the like, but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2
> BOSL2 ... but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly It's also extremely slow: it implements chamfers and fillets using morpho, and if you have a large number of fillets, the morpho algorithms (minkowski / hull) are very much non linear in time on polygonal meshes, which leads to compute time explosion if you want a visually smooth result.
$fn = $preview ? 32 : 256;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.
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
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FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that.
I just tested it out of curiosity and found that viewport manipulation behaves in a very similar way to onshape which feels very natural to me. I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea.
Here's my take on CAD in the browser! https://vcad.io I implemented a full kernel in rust and compile it to wasm https://github.com/ecto/vcad