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BRL-CAD

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Re: BRL-CAD

#21

Post by justinsaccount »

I used this in 1999 or so when I had just started out using linux. It was a huge pain to get running. It was for US citizens only or something, and I had to have my parents write to the government requesting the decryption key for the installer. It may have required something crazy like a fax.

After I got it running I had some trouble getting it to do things and wrote to the email address asking for example files. Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached.

Re: BRL-CAD

#22

Post by phkahler »

gh02t wrote: post #11
digdugdirk wrote: post #4

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 mean…

CSG and CAD are just really hard to get right from scratch technically, with lots of math and edge cases and a massive number of features and optimizations you need to implement to hit minimum viability. Add to that the UI on top of the underlying geometry engine is inherently complicated and is a considerable software engineering problem in its own right. Plus the big players have so much momentum and offer free/nea…

>> Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm praying for, personally.

Current Solvespace maintainer here. IMHO there is a lot that can readily be added to solvespace. Then there could be a big effort to do hierarchical sketches. And it is reasonably possible to rewrite some of the geometry internals if needed. All of these things are a LOT of work. The problem is the number of people with the background, software skills, and interest in contributing is very very small.

Having said that, we will just keep chugging along. I've been very busy with personal stuff this year, but soon should have free time to address my backlog of stuff I personally want to do.

Open Source has the advantage of time as long as people stay at it ;-) OTOH Blender and FreeCAD have used the constraint solver. If they borrow some of UI ideas then we all win too!

Re: BRL-CAD

#23

Post by foobarbecue »

digdugdirk wrote: post #4

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 mean…

I have been really pleased to see Freecad's steady improvement, and I think it's only been a few years since Blender reached the the point that it was competitive with the $$$ modellers / renderers, especially from a UI standpoint. So, I'm hopeful that in a few more years, Freecad will reach "Blender level" where it really competes with SolidWorks. One big step in that direction will be for them to pick one of the assembly constraints plugins and incorporate it as a first-class feature.

A pattern I've often seen is a tortise vs the hare sort of thing between FLOSS and $$$ software. The free stuff improves slowly but steadily. The $$$ stuff changes quickly but those changes are often driven by perverse incentives (people looking for promotions, shareholder value, etc.), and development tends to go off the rails and piss off users.

Re: BRL-CAD

#24

Post by naasking »

threatripper wrote: post #12
digdugdirk wrote: post #4

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 mean…

The CAD geometry kernel is the problem. It needs to handle a ton of different features and gets very complex very quickly. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE which is also used by quite a few other programs. This kernel dates back to the 90s and is supported by a company. See: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/OpenCASCADE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology

There are alternatives these days:

* https://www.cgal.org/

* https://www.libfive.com/

Re: BRL-CAD

#25

Post by SideQuark »

marcodiego wrote: post #20
samwillis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This completely, OpenCASCADE is just not a good enough foundation to build something as powerful and stable as SolidWorks on, and I'm not convinced it could become one. It would take 10s millions dollars and many years to build a new geometric kernel that would allow an open source CAD package to compete at the same level as the "Pro" packages. That would require a massively collaborative effort in the engineering co…

We heard similar comments about linux and GNU a few decades ago.

And IBM and RedHat both poured literally billions into it to make it work at the level it does today, which underscores the point. And there have been billions more poured in from a lot of other corporate groups.

Re: BRL-CAD

#26

Post by Accujack »

marcodiego wrote: post #20
samwillis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This completely, OpenCASCADE is just not a good enough foundation to build something as powerful and stable as SolidWorks on, and I'm not convinced it could become one. It would take 10s millions dollars and many years to build a new geometric kernel that would allow an open source CAD package to compete at the same level as the "Pro" packages. That would require a massively collaborative effort in the engineering co…

We heard similar comments about linux and GNU a few decades ago.

...and at the same time, GNU was making the same comments about CAD software. It's been on the list of desired projects for GNU since about 1990 - a CAD program comparable to AutoCAD.

The problem is that writing one takes a big effort - like Linux kernel sized, and needs people with niche technical knowledge. It's much, much easier to find someone who can write a java app for a web page than it is to find someone who can write CSG code for a CAD system.

It may eventually happen, but it's not inevitable.

Re: BRL-CAD

#27

Post by a9h74j »

phkahler wrote: post #22
gh02t wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSG and CAD are just really hard to get right from scratch technically, with lots of math and edge cases and a massive number of features and optimizations you need to implement to hit minimum viability. Add to that the UI on top of the underlying geometry engine is inherently complicated and is a considerable software engineering problem in its own right. Plus the big players have so much momentum and offer free/nea…

>> Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm praying for, personally. Current Solvespace maintainer here. IMHO there is a lot that can readily be added to solvespace. Then there could be a big effort to do hierarchical sketches. And it is reasonably possible to rewrite some of the geometry internals if needed. All of these things are a LOT of work. The problem is the number of people with the background, softw…

First I have heard of Solvespace so a naive zen-mind question.

Does any system aspire to be a Prolog for 3D? You sketch a variety of views and a system solves, if possible, for a solid geometry representation?

Re: BRL-CAD

#29

Post by ska »

elcritch wrote: post #18
samwillis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This completely, OpenCASCADE is just not a good enough foundation to build something as powerful and stable as SolidWorks on, and I'm not convinced it could become one. It would take 10s millions dollars and many years to build a new geometric kernel that would allow an open source CAD package to compete at the same level as the "Pro" packages. That would require a massively collaborative effort in the engineering co…

I believe an initiative backed by a group of large university, national lab, DOE, etc would also be sufficient. Particularly if it was written in say Julia where non-C++ experts (aka grad students) could participate then it could grab a lot of attention from various research labs. Then you could have a winning formula without a FAANG type company.

The problem is incentives. The work necessary to bring a code base like this into production level and maintain it: be realistic - this will not be done by grad student labor without significant supervision, regardless of language. This is many times the effort needed to show "it works" once.

There is currently no incentive model that I know of that can make this work at a university, or even national lab. In these contexts currently it's really hard to get funding for a single "real" programmer for a year, let along a proper effort for something like this. If it became a critical infrastructure project for a federal level agency, sure - but why would they support doing it in public?

Re: BRL-CAD

#30

Post by jbay808 »

foobarbecue wrote: post #23
digdugdirk wrote: post #4

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 mean…

I have been really pleased to see Freecad's steady improvement, and I think it's only been a few years since Blender reached the the point that it was competitive with the $$$ modellers / renderers, especially from a UI standpoint. So, I'm hopeful that in a few more years, Freecad will reach "Blender level" where it really competes with SolidWorks. One big step in that direction will be for them to pick one of the as…

Agreed. FreeCAD is coming along at a good pace. One of the devs (RealThunder) maintains a development branch which fixes the topological naming problem, which was probably FreeCAD's main weakness. It's already very usable; once that fix gets merged into the main branch I think they'll be ready for the 1.0 release.
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