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Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

mattkeeter.com

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Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#31

Post by rwallace »

krschultz wrote: post #21

> Antimony is a computer-aided design (CAD) tool from a parallel universe in which CAD software evolved from Lisp machines rather than drafting tables. Funny, I'd be way more interested in the software engineering tools that are inspired by drafting tables than the mechanical engineering tools inspired by text editors. If you spend some time with anyone proficient with the big CAD/CAE programs you will see how effici…

Drafting table style software engineering tools have been around for decades. It turns out that the only ones programmers actually want to use are the ones that deal with something that is actually visual/geometric, i.e. the layout of graphic user interfaces, so those are the ones that were kept; that's how Visual Studio got its name.

Nowadays when you need to cater to web browsers and mobile devices with a large range of screen sizes, even those are largely eschewed because the layout has to be redone at run time anyway. But there are still some in use by people who work on fixed size form layouts.

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#32

Post by mkeeter »

aswanson wrote: post #14

Impressive. Wonder how long it took to develop.

I've been working on tools of this nature for about four years, though the only thing that's made it through mostly-unchanged is the geometry kernel.

This grew out of my thesis work (2011-2013); in rough chronological order, here are a few documents from that time period:

http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/S62.12/people/keeter.matt/ind...

http://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/kokopelli/

http://www.mattkeeter.com/research/thesis.pdf

http://www.mattkeeter.com/research/siggraph_poster.pdf

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#33

Post by brudgers »

colomon wrote: post #27

Okay, I'm a CAD software developer instead of an actual CAD engineer, so my perspective may be a bit biased. But this CSG (constructive solid geometry) idea is not in any way new. The reason it's kind of obscure now is that spline-based boundary representation systems (B-reps) took over the market decades ago. If you think about, say, the latest car designs, those free-flowing shapes are pretty easy to do in B-rep, a…

From a marketing standpoint where everyone dreams of out Frank Ghery'ing Frank Ghery splines rule, but CSG is probably well suited from a practical standpoint for representing the walls and windows of the architecture that typically gets built.

The problem of course, is that once there's a column with acanthus leaves, splines are the way to model its details and a WYSIWG needs them. For architecture, splines are in the aesthetic details, but constructive solids are a good tool for representing the important part of the constructed solids that are buildings.

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#35

Post by smoyer »

colomon wrote: post #27

Okay, I'm a CAD software developer instead of an actual CAD engineer, so my perspective may be a bit biased. But this CSG (constructive solid geometry) idea is not in any way new. The reason it's kind of obscure now is that spline-based boundary representation systems (B-reps) took over the market decades ago. If you think about, say, the latest car designs, those free-flowing shapes are pretty easy to do in B-rep, a…

And Auto-CAD had a Lisp engine in the '80s ... You could automate almost any function of the drawing system, build "macros" as well as patterns and even alter the DXF generation.

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#37

Post by eggy »

hugs wrote: post #26
eggy wrote: post #22

I like the interface, and being a Blender3D user, I like nodes. However, I am long AutoCad / Inventor user, and I don't see what's new. You could do CSG modeling in AutoCad with union, difference, and intersection, and in Inventor you have that and sketch-based parametric modeling; update the sketch, and the model changes. Go back in the history, and change a value, and the model changes. In AutoCad you could use Aut…

Compared to AutoCad/Inventor, cost and licensing are two huge differences. Antimony is open source: https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony/blob/develop/README.md

True, but I was addressing the 'novelty' observation made, not cost and licensing. I do like the look of it.I just think it has been available, and is not new. Even the tease of Lisp machine when it has python in the background, not Lisp. For free, the now-opensource Solvespace [1] is a cool parametric 3D-modeler with STL check export and you can view some kinematic movement by dragging a constrained link in a linkage. [1] www.solvespace.com

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#38

Post by rwmj »

colomon wrote: post #27

Okay, I'm a CAD software developer instead of an actual CAD engineer, so my perspective may be a bit biased. But this CSG (constructive solid geometry) idea is not in any way new. The reason it's kind of obscure now is that spline-based boundary representation systems (B-reps) took over the market decades ago. If you think about, say, the latest car designs, those free-flowing shapes are pretty easy to do in B-rep, a…

I remember writing basically this CSG-based CAD software at university, and that was 20+ years ago.

(And it was written in Miranda!)

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#39

Post by cowsandmilk »

jordigh wrote: post #34

Huh, homebrew non-free license. I wonder if the intention was even to make it non-free. It does not allow commercial use, which is forbidden by default. Oh well, at least homebrew licenses are getting rarer and rarer these days.

> It does not allow commercial use, which is forbidden by default.

what are you claiming here?

Re: Antimony – A fresh look at CAD software

#40

Post by foldr »

niklasni1 wrote: post #17
fit2rule wrote: post #10

Well, I thought OpenSCAD was a pretty fresh look at things: http://openscad.org/ .. with fairly similar goals - only not for architecture, but rather 3d-printig ..

OpenSCAD is functional (mostly), but it could have been great if they hadn't invented their own language. Then you could have had fancy features like error messages.

Openjscad (openjscad.org) is quite nice. I doubt it would be suitable for anything big, but it works well enough for small models.
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