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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/
Dune3D uses SolveSpace behind the scene.
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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.
>> Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT 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 d…
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It uses exactly the same font in the desktop version, and is probably entirely intentional.
Intentional indeed. It is GNU Unifont - a 973KiB file that covers practically all of Unicode. In a bitmap font, platform independent, self contained, small. Practically all that SolveSpace strives to be. https://www.unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html Perhaps I've been using computers for too long but I actually like the non anti-aliased "sharp" and "pixely" look :-)
This is what it looks like on my screen: https://imgur.com/a/YeAdiXC
A good pixel font would be a vast improvement over this, though I'd still prefer something that scales well (and respects the DPI of my screen, and isn't too small compared to the menu font...).
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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.
> 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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FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that.
I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets. Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
Actually I think they have a hobbyist subscription which isn't totally extortionate now if you want to stay legal. Maybe get it for a year.
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FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that.
Some years ago I tried to learn CAD by doing some FreeCAD tutorials, and failed. But I hear 1.0 was a big step forward, and the recently released 1.1 is also a big step, and it should be somewhat decent nowadays. Maybe I need to try again one day.
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I'm curious why you didn't go with OCCT for Solvespace.
>> 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…
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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 stubbor…
Perhaps they have indeed become "one of the worst corp. in the world of software", but in the early years they were very interesting. The founder of Autodesk, John Walker (he died in 2024) wrote/edited and interesting book on the early years: "The Autodesk File" https://fourmilab.ch/autofile/
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.