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3D CAD software is light years behind in the open source ecosystem, but competing with Solid Works or Auto Desk is a enormous task... Although Blender seems to
by gitgud 7y ago
3D CAD software is light years behind in the open source ecosystem, but competing with Solid Works or Auto Desk is a enormous task... Although Blender seems to be catching up in 3D animation!
- safwan 7y agoCAD software like AutoCad does not have any good Open Source alternative. As it is mostly used by Civil Engineers, I think when the Civil Engineers will motivated by the Open Source manifesto, they will approach making soemthing good alternative of CAD software!
- gitgud 7y agoThe crazy part is how expensive CAD software is. AutoCAD can be thousands of dollars a year and was created [1] 37 years ago! The age of the product would surely reveal the difficulty of creating a competing product... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD
- burfog 7y agoCAD is far from just something for civil engineers. It's used by mechanical engineers. It's what you use to design an engine. Good CAD software hooks up to the inventory system so that parts can be ordered automatically. It's used by electrical engineers. Special CAD packages exist for integrated circuit design, magnetics, and antennas. For example a motor might contain coils of wire, permanent magnets, air, and various components through which magnetic field lines are directed. Eddy currents must be analysed. It's used by chemical engineers. Pipes and tanks and pumps get laid out. Stuff like water hammer must be accounted for, except maybe the fluid is poisonous and explosive. Expansion joints for thermal stress and pressure changes might be important. Stress on welds must be calculated.
- mrfusion 7y agoOpenscad? Or that doesn’t do everything?
- gitgud 7y agoOpenscad is a great project and I'm impressed at it's performance and small size, but it's completely unusable for non-programmers (99% of consumers of CAD products). Almost all drafters and fabricators just want to interact with the 3D model with the mouse. Dragging and adding features. Also 2D drawings are the main output of a CAD program, to build the designs from. Which Openscad doesn't provide.
- dbcurtis 7y agoOpenscad is a completely different paradigm. It is a graphics scripting engine, not a parametric modeler. Openscad is good for what it does, but is a hugely different beast from a parametric modeling system. In solidworks (to pick on the one I am most familiar with, NOT expert with) you can click on an edge and say "radius this". In Solidworks, you can have a master model drive dimensions down to other drawings, so that multiple people can work on different parts of the same system and get the bolt holes to line up. In Solidworks, you can say "give me 2% draft angles on these faces, and run an injection mold flow analysis." Openscan is cool and I use it, but nobody would confuse it with Solidworks or similar.
- kwk1 7y agoFreeCAD (https://www.freecadweb.org https://www.freecadweb.org) is also on an accelerating pace in terms of quality, although it still has a ways to go depending on your workflow.
- svet_0 7y agoTried using FreeCAD for a simple project for parametric design, it became really slow to the point of being unusable. after only about 10-20 operations, Other than that it's pretty fun to use. Fusion is orders of magnitudes better though.