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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

by gh02t 4y ago

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/nearly free (in terms of cost) options that are really slick and powerful e.g. Fusion360 or OnShape. Blender and KiCAD are examples of similar semi-niche professional tools that have been successful against similar barriers, but I still am not optimistic. Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm praying for, personally.

PostOnce 4y ago
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
- gh02t 4y ago
  Yeah to be fair I never actually liked Fusion 360 personally. I don't find it super intuitive, but it is quite powerful and polished and I know some people who use it professionally and can do magic in it. OnShape really is perfect to my tastes in terms of being super intuitive yet powerful, but the cloud aspect gives me heartburn. Part of me hopes Autodesk locking down what used to be very generous license terms on F360 might spawn more OSS work to replace it. Similar crackdowns on Eagle were what motivated a lot of the improvements to KiCAD in the last several years that really took it over the line to being a tool I think is legitimately competitive.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Have you tried Shapr3D? It is really intuitive to use. The downsides seem to be (1) it's CAD-only and you have to export to another tool to do analysis or manufacturing steps, and (2) price. But there's a free version to play around with.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION TIMES if you dns block it…
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    Any alternatives you'd recommend?
    - buildbot 4y ago
      No, I have been looking extensively trying to find a decent option. Possibly Alibre through a VM? Solid edge is another possibility, still a subscription service though.
- joshvm 4y ago
  I gave up on Fusion360 when it told me that the STL exporter wouldn't work without a cloud connection. The app itself works well enough offline, so this seems like a bizarre omission. Surprisingly there are places in the world with 3D printers, but poor to no internet access. In the past Autodesk's servers have also crashed and people have been unable to export models that weren't previously online.
phkahler 4y ago
>> 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!
- a9h74j 4y ago
  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?
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> 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.
  - stew-j 4y ago
    This is, in spirit, what Solvespace does--although like the other reply here says with extruded 2D. From https://solvespace.com/tech.pl https://solvespace.com/tech.pl > The core of any parametric CAD program is its geometric constraint solver. and > In SolveSpace, constraints are represented as equations in a symbolic algebra system. In general, these equations are solved numerically, by a modified Newton's method. and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_constraint_solving#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_constraint_solving#M... > symbolic methods have been applied to this type of constraint solving (see Reference 20 on the Wikipedia link). And your Zen "beginner mind" question got me to thinking, maybe I could use Prolog itself in my CAD system to directly make 3D shapes, since Prolog has been written in Lisp. Although Prolog does have a number of limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Limitations

by gh02t 4y ago

PostOnce 4y ago

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

gh02t 4y ago
Yeah to be fair I never actually liked Fusion 360 personally. I don't find it super intuitive, but it is quite powerful and polished and I know some people who use it professionally and can do magic in it. OnShape really is perfect to my tastes in terms of being super intuitive yet powerful, but the cloud aspect gives me heartburn. Part of me hopes Autodesk locking down what used to be very generous license terms on F360 might spawn more OSS work to replace it. Similar crackdowns on Eagle were what motivated a lot of the improvements to KiCAD in the last several years that really took it over the line to being a tool I think is legitimately competitive.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Have you tried Shapr3D? It is really intuitive to use. The downsides seem to be (1) it's CAD-only and you have to export to another tool to do analysis or manufacturing steps, and (2) price. But there's a free version to play around with.
buildbot 4y ago
Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION TIMES if you dns block it…
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Any alternatives you'd recommend?
  - buildbot 4y ago
    No, I have been looking extensively trying to find a decent option. Possibly Alibre through a VM? Solid edge is another possibility, still a subscription service though.
joshvm 4y ago
I gave up on Fusion360 when it told me that the STL exporter wouldn't work without a cloud connection. The app itself works well enough offline, so this seems like a bizarre omission. Surprisingly there are places in the world with 3D printers, but poor to no internet access. In the past Autodesk's servers have also crashed and people have been unable to export models that weren't previously online.

phkahler 4y ago

>> 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!

a9h74j 4y ago
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?
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> 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.
- stew-j 4y ago
  This is, in spirit, what Solvespace does--although like the other reply here says with extruded 2D. From https://solvespace.com/tech.pl https://solvespace.com/tech.pl > The core of any parametric CAD program is its geometric constraint solver. and > In SolveSpace, constraints are represented as equations in a symbolic algebra system. In general, these equations are solved numerically, by a modified Newton's method. and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_constraint_solving#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_constraint_solving#M... > symbolic methods have been applied to this type of constraint solving (see Reference 20 on the Wikipedia link). And your Zen "beginner mind" question got me to thinking, maybe I could use Prolog itself in my CAD system to directly make 3D shapes, since Prolog has been written in Lisp. Although Prolog does have a number of limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog#Limitations