Live data from Hacker News

Parametric CAD in Rust

campedersen.com

51–60 of 184 posts

Re: Parametric CAD in Rust

#51
post #26

SketchUp was my go to for a while but I'm done with parametric personally, trying to fix meshes for 3D printing... time I grow up and use something like Fusion360 seems like or onshape. Still it was good/simple enough for non-round shapes in SketchUp except they have some kind of memory leak/bug at least for the 2017 version. But I guess quit being cheap and buy a modern copy on my part. Edit: oh I guess sketchup is…

It's using a constructive solid geometry system. You can add and subtract volumes. Making a hole is subtracting a volume. This has classically been numeric roundoff hell, where points that should coincide and surfaces which should touch don't get handled properly due to numerical error. The geometry engine is Manifold, which guarantees watertight meshes from boolean operations.

Ah. That's what's doing the constructive solid geometry. Here's the 2009 PhD thesis behind the object merge and difference algorithms inside Manifold. Nice. At last, soundness. This is a long-standing problem. And now there's an open source implementation. Manifold itself is in C++, not Rust, though.

None of this is parametric. That's a different problem. That's where you put in constraints such as A is perpendicular to B, B is 100mm from C, etc., and the constraint solver tries to satisfy all the constraints. Change a dimension and everything adjusts to preserve the constraints. Parametric CAD is all about constraint solving and expressing conflicts to the user. Autodesk Inventor, Fusion, etc. have good constraint solvers.

[1] https://github.com/elalish/manifold/blob/master/docs/RobustB...

Re: Parametric CAD in Rust

#52
post #42

Is anyone else put off by the AI-sounding text? Two things that give it away for me are the excessive use of punctuation-emphasized sentence fragments ex: > No clicking. No undo. Just recompile. > That's our mascot. Entirely CSG. > No garbage collection pauses. No floating point surprises from a scripting layer. And worst of all, the dreaded "and/but honestly": > But honestly, the main reason is the toolchain. Am I m…

Thanks for the feedback

Re: Parametric CAD in Rust

#53
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built something very similar (also based on triangle meshes, but in TS), and while it wouldn't work for say 3D printing, my target is game object modeling. I guess people have specific use cases in mind when referring to "CAD".

In my mind, cad that you’re not going to manufacture is “modeling”. Not sure if that’s a common verbal distinction.

An example of common terms that disagrees with that somewhat, is "CAD/CAM" where the design component is clearly distinct from the manufacturing component.

I do agree that historically, software aimed at building 3d models for games/animations and other digital use was usually called modeling and not cad. I'm thinking of software like 3D Studio Max back in the 90s here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAD/CAM

I notice though that the Wikipedia article for CAD says: "This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, and to create a database for manufacturing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design

Re: Parametric CAD in Rust

#60
post #30

The opening paragraph is very telling; the author doesn't seem to understand typical pro-level parametric CAD programs available on the market: > I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click around for an hour, export an STL, realize the bolt pattern is 2mm off, repeat. This doesn't make sense. When you r…

Read a bit before critisizing: > One thing I care about that most CAD tools don't: vcad is designed to be used by AI coding agents.

AI coding agents are notoriously bad at anything that involves spatial awareness.
Post reply on HN