> The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.
Wow.
BRL-CAD
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: BRL-CAD
#52As 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 spent thousands of hours working on one of those open source CAD projects, and i made about 100 dollars.
eventually i had to get a "real job", a job where i can't really be doing domain specific open source stuff without a potential conflict of interest.
on the plus side, i just bought a couch without having to worry about whether i can eat dinner.
Re: BRL-CAD
#53As 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.…
"drafting is a low-value activity " "low-value workers".
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??
Re: BRL-CAD
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Suppose that there would be an open source CAD software that does all the basic things right (like Blender). I agree with you that probably nobody would pay big money for that. That's one reason why it doesn't exist today. But suppose that it exists. Why then would all those "plugin makers" invest in a specific proprietary software when they could extend the open source software instead? Why would users want a propri…
Contributing to open source CAD would be economically stupid. Vendors know exactly how big the market is. Most sales are "conversions", not first-time buyers. Open source would be an exit ramp for their customers.
Re: BRL-CAD
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
"drafting is a low-value activity " "low-value workers". ... ... ??
*Dollar value
Re: BRL-CAD
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Your comment is incredibly insightful, more than many people will realize. Case in point, BRL-CAD has had more than 450 years of full-time effort invested, tens of millions with development spanning over four decades. However, that investment is heavily centered around features, integrations, and capabilities that are not as typically useful to the general public. Usability's slowly expanded, but primary paid focus i…
Nobody pays for usability. They pay for service contracts. Then it's the vendor's problem to keep that hunk of junk running.
Re: BRL-CAD
#57I 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…
Isn't Pro/E a b-rep cad?
BRL-CAD is one of the few "full-fledged" CAD systems that I know of which is explicitly CSG, while most (all?) commercial CAD programs are B-REP in nature.
CSG and B-REP are two worlds apart. I'm not sure why in the comments we're suggesting alternatives in the two categories interchangeably. They're not [*].
An alternative to BRL-CAD would be OpenSCAD or libfive studio + other tools (since BRL-CAD does a ton more) and more recently CadQuery. Maaaaybe Tinkercad could be classified as CSG?
CSG makes some operations easy at the expense of other things that become incredibly hard. The same is true for B-REP. Doing gears, highly procedural or FEM-directed models via CSG? Easy-peasy. But try to add a filled between two edges. Step it up 50 notches to fillet one edge and do the equivalent of "tangent propagation". Now the same, but also try projecting a structure on that round face.
CSG's speed is also wildly overblown. While B-REP is not exactly lightweight, computation complexity scales with the complexity of the model but can be sped up by caching intermediate representations.
In CSG this is not always true, since caching the intermediate representation can destroy the accuracy of the final mesh in ways which are very difficult to compute. So even for apparently easy models, times spend walking the space to remesh your model can grow _very_ quickly, hampering the ability to iterate quickly and experiment.
Not to mention, "measuring things" in CSG is hard. This is never mentioned, but none of the tools I've worked with so far offers convenient ways to examine and measure the objects you're working on. For a parametric model this is vital!
[*] Not saying there's no overlap. I'm using both systems. B-REP generally wins on a model which is feature-directed, which is why it's more popular. But I can relate to people that think that BRL-CAD is "hard".
Re: BRL-CAD
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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?
>> 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?
I'm not aware of any. Maybe slightly related, my plan for a "hole tool" in Solvespace is to add a hole entity to 2D drawings that will automatically create a featured hole when the sketch is extruded. But that's not actually solving anything in a math sense.
Re: BRL-CAD
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd be keen to be party to this - off the back of the recent Fusion 360 fiasco i've met a few others interested in this. Currently researching geometric modelling kernels but collaboration in the community and bringing focus would solve this... even if it's better awareness and marketing so that solvespace folk and brlcad folk (and more!) aren't doubling up.
I'd like to get some kind of OSS CAD group going but I'm not sure how much collaboration we could really do. FreeCAD uses OCCT, Solvespace uses it's own thing, and I think BRL-CAD uses its own thing (several of them). Then there are things like gcad3d https://www.gcad3d.org/ which has its own hand written STEP reader/writer which I'd love to borrow some day.
If there is interest in creating a new geometry kernel I'd be happy to discuss how ours works, what the main challenges are, and what limitations the approach has.
Another topic is licenses. I see FreeCAD uses LibreDWG now but has to jump through some hoops because its GPLv3 (not LGPL) and they are GPL2.x.
Re: BRL-CAD
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
>> I just learned about solvespace this past year and kudos on your progress.
Thanks!
>> Spot on the nose about number of people and their endurance tilting at the hard problems.
It worries me at times. The creator has moved on but can still be consulted on stuff. The 2nd lead maintainer burned out and nominated me. I see my position as somewhat temporary, but I'm willing to hold it until 1) I get the improvements done that I want to and 2) the right successor comes along - which I worry may never happen ;-)
>> I do believe open source CAD can get there, but it'll require more coordination.
Completely agree. Not sure how to focus all the different efforts though. Talking about it is certainly a start.