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BRL-CAD
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: BRL-CAD
#32Our company wrote C++ and Ruby wrappers around BRL-CAD a number of years ago for scripted CAD, here is the tutorial for the radio example:
https://mirrors.sarata.com/non-gnu/tovero/Tovero_tutorial.pd...
We used it for a few small projects. BRL-CAD also has Tcl scripting.
We've currently switched to pure Common Lisp and F-rep modeling for scripted CAD. This is the old CL one (again wrapped C++) we are porting:
Re: BRL-CAD
#33As 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 speak from two types of experience - both a user of CAE and a developer of CAE.
There's no money in CAD by itself, meaning just the drawing part. Drafting is a low-value activity often performed by low-value workers who don't write software. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't make software tools for themselves. It's not like when web developers make web development tools, or when machinists make machinist tools.
CAD is sort of a piazza where the value a company gets from it comes from everything that's attached to it - reporting, CAE, CAM, etc. And they do invest in those things, often quite heavily.
It's big business to create these tools. The investment and expertise that go into them is enormous. That's why many of them cost as much as hiring another employee. They do at least as much work as one. They keep up with all the latest and greatest regulations, technologies, manufacturing processes, etc. And they give you access to a lot of valuable proprietary information.
Even if a company threw twice as much money at open source CAD, they'd still get basically none of that. They would just have an expensive drawing tool. It would be basically worthless and worth almost nobody's time.
For customers with low requirements, the less expensive tools do the job at just the right price point where it doesn't make sense to invest in advancing something like freecad.
Also, many companies in many countries are pretty much "allowed" to pirate the really expensive software. Once they get big enough, the software company will ask them to start paying some reduced amount. So there's an unofficial free tier that's way better than any open source toy.
Re: BRL-CAD
#34I 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…
> Using it for my day-to-day work made me want to quit my job
Funny that. Working with Creo on a day-to-day basis makes me want to quit my job.
Re: BRL-CAD
#35I 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. Mi…
> Mike Muuss himself wrote back with a bunch of demo files attached.
That's kind of awesome. I built it from source a few years after that and didn't have to deal with any headaches at all.
Re: BRL-CAD
#36As 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…
Working with solid geometry and boundary representation structures is immensely more complicated and affects everything from dev velocity to GUI design to usability to acquiring devs. Content modelers (e.g., Blender) deal with considerably simpler geometry representations that are not typically valid or easily verifiable for engineering purposes. That's why it's very non-trivial, decades worth, to turn something like Blender into a CAD tool. Even seemingly simple features like CAD converters can take years of effort. BRL-CAD's primary investment has been on geometric analysis (e.g., solid ray tracing) and it's unparalleled in that regard, but that's a niche audience without better usability.
Re: BRL-CAD
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah. Sometimes someone brilliant does something hard for the good of humanity though. I'm think specifically of that guy who wrote DXVK back in the mid 2010s. He basically made gaming on Linux possible.
Re: BRL-CAD
#38Earlier 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…
Licensing notwithstanding, it'd be cool if we could find a way to collaborate. I just learned about solvespace this past year and kudos on your progress.
Spot on the nose about number of people and their endurance tilting at the hard problems. BRL-CAD's been going at it longer than anyone, and the backlog only increases. I do believe open source CAD can get there, but it'll require more coordination.
Re: BRL-CAD
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fusion360 keeps getting worse and worse, they revoke features and jack the price every few months. At some point open source becomes the better value, at least there you know features won't be stolen or the price increased without notice
Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION TIMES if you dns block it…
Any alternatives you'd recommend?
Re: BRL-CAD
#40As 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 speak from two types of experience - both a user of CAE and a developer of CAE. There's no money in CAD by itself, meaning just the drawing part. Drafting is a low-value activity often performed by low-value workers who don't write software. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't make software tools for themselves. It's not like when web developers make web development tools, or when machinists make machinist tools.…
To add to this: many CAD products share the same underlying "engine" that computes the geometry of intersections, unions, surfaces of revolution, chamfers, bevels, etc...
The value as linkdink said above is the add-ons, integrations, extensions, and the like.
It's a bit like Unreal Engine 5 having integrated the Quixel model library. You don't just get some C++ code, you also get ready-made art assets. And then you get compatibility with four game console platforms, mobile platforms, etc...