Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
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Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
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Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#2This is neat, but from a usability standpoint most mechanical engineers prefer to work with draft style sketches rather than a node-based interface. Thus it is neat and impressive, but I am not sure it is what the consumers in the CAD market desire.
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#3OK, this is incredibly nice.
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#4This is neat, but from a usability standpoint most mechanical engineers prefer to work with draft style sketches rather than a node-based interface. Thus it is neat and impressive, but I am not sure it is what the consumers in the CAD market desire.
Well this is a CAD software from a parallel universe, you wouldn't know what those mechanical engineers from that universe prefer.
I'm a physicist and I only used one CAD software occasionally. In the CAD software I used I had to clone primitive objects to use them in multiple operations. If I wanted to change one dimension I had to update all the clones. Simply the acyclic graph model works better for this than the tree model. (Also some operations were irreversible, that was absolutely inexcusable.)
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#5This is neat, but from a usability standpoint most mechanical engineers prefer to work with draft style sketches rather than a node-based interface. Thus it is neat and impressive, but I am not sure it is what the consumers in the CAD market desire.
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Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#6To add a bit of historical perspective, AutoCad could be extended through Lisp (AutoLisp), back in the day. So I posit that this approach is nothing new and unlikely to be what the customers of CAD packages don't already have.
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#7Looks nice. I have been working ten years professionally developing a CAD program, and if I could time travel and give my ten years younger self a single tip it would be to use a proper geometrical kernel (like CGAL) rather than doing anything with floating point.
The tree rep is very cool. It could probably render implicitly using distance fields without even needing triangulation. http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctio...
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#8It's awesome how the nodes update as you drag things around in the viewer. I wonder whether there's a way to visually specify constraints (two points are coincident, two edges abut one another, and so on) instead of representing constraints implicitly through connections in the node graph.
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#9This is really nice. Seems super easy to use, unlike other CAD/3D modelling software I've tried before. I think a lot of software could benefit from this 'timeless' graph/node based approach, rather than most UI's which only let you see the latest version with a long undo chain. It reminded me a bit of Bret Victor's drawing tool[1] too.
Only problem, to me, is that it seems like a lot of work to get a UI like this off the ground. It'd be lovely to see support of a node-based UI built into some common UI frameworks.
[1] http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend...
Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software
#10Well, I thought OpenSCAD was a pretty fresh look at things:
.. with fairly similar goals - only not for architecture, but rather 3d-printig ..