BRL-CAD

#1

Post by aparks517 » Sat, Aug 13, 2022, 12:40 PM UTC

BRL-CAD
en.wikipedia.org

Re: BRL-CAD

#2

Post by forgotpwd16 » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

Was gonna ask why not link the homepage instead but apparently the wiki is linked as About page from the project's homepage.

Re: BRL-CAD

#3

Post by dkga » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

Silly me thought this was something interesting about the Brazilian Real - Canadian Dollar exchange rate!

Re: BRL-CAD

#4

Post by digdugdirk » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

As a Mechanical Engineer, I would absolutely love to see something like this (or Freecad/OpenSCAD/etc) step up to the "Blender level" to functionally compete against Solidworks. Its expensive, its buggy, and it requires a beast of a computer to function in any semi-respectable way.

Does anyone have any experience in the software side of the industry to help explain why nothing open source is able to step up in a meaningful way?

Re: BRL-CAD

#5

Post by TakeBlaster16 » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #2

Was gonna ask why not link the homepage instead but apparently the wiki is linked as About page from the project's homepage.

That's honestly not a bad idea in general. Wikipedia does a better job describing most software than the landing page typically does. That said, BRL-CAD seems to be an exception and describes itself very well in large text above the fold! 10/10

Re: BRL-CAD

#6

Post by CmdrLoskene » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps we were using it for something it was not intended to do, or not the way it was meant to be used. I knew my way around the Pro/E interface and it was miles ahead of BRL-CAD. But even CADDS-IV was better than BRL-CAD. I can only speculate that being government-funded, the dev team for BRL-CAD had to make brutal decisions regarding when the feature set was "good enough," because they were working with a very limited budget tied to specific program goals. I don't know. I do know that using BRL-CAD was hellish back in the day.

Re: BRL-CAD

#7

Post by SiempreViernes » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

CmdrLoskene wrote: post #6

I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps w…

This comment would increase tremendously in value if you said something about which version of BRL-CAD you used.

Re: BRL-CAD

#8

Post by fcoury » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

dkga wrote: post #3

Silly me thought this was something interesting about the Brazilian Real - Canadian Dollar exchange rate!

Came here to say this :-)

Re: BRL-CAD

#9

Post by threatripper » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

CmdrLoskene wrote: post #6

I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps w…

Did you have many different problems with BRL-CAD or was it connected to specific features?

While I can't speak for BRL-CAD my experience with FreeCad which uses OpenCascade has been mixed. The chamfer/fillet tool there is just broken. If you use that and change some dimension it is likely to randomly crash. So, overall my experience has been ranging from rock solid to total trash depending on which features you use and what kind of models you create with it. The key question is "what do the developers use it for?" which should give you a hint for what kind of problem it is made.

Re: BRL-CAD

#10

Post by CmdrLoskene » Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #7

CmdrLoskene wrote: post #6

I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps w…

This comment would increase tremendously in value if you said something about which version of BRL-CAD you used.

Unfortunately I have forgotten the version. This was in the early 90s.