7 ms·

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amo

by gehsty 11mo ago

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get started for free!

1220512064 11mo ago
IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.
- al_borland 11mo ago
  I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.
  - mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
    Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.
    - al_borland 11mo ago
      My main goal is to reproduce the floor plan of my house, so I can figure out how to best layout the furniture.
      - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
        I like using paper and cardboard for this, dollhouse style, much easier to move things around and visualize that way and more fun than clicking a mouse to boot :^) Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho
        al_borland 11mo ago
        This was my plan B. I do have a scale I can use for it. I’ll check out Inkscape as well. I’ve tried using some raster graphics in the past, but I couldn’t type dimensions and had to use the rules and guides with snapping. It mostly worked, but was a bit annoying.
      - mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
        I actually did the same thing so that I could figure out how to lay out my workshop! What I'd do is: - Spreadsheet workbench --> Create spreadsheet (name it "measurements"). (This is optional) - Switch to Part design workbench --> Create body (name it "layout") --> select XY plane --> Create sketch --> Create Polyline - Zoom out, start drawing the rooms in your house, approximately to scale. - Before going into too much detail, add a dimension (select line --> "Constrain Distance") to the first line you draw, so that you can do the rest of your drawing approximately to scale. Then the general shape won't get messed up when you add dimensions to everything else. - (If you have a photo or picture, you can import that to sketch over). - Add constraints to match your room measurements, mostly vertical or horizontal distance constraints. Be careful not to overconstrain the sketch. (You can put the measurements directly into the sketch constraints, or you can put them into the top-level spreadsheet, create an alias for each cells, and then set the dimensions to reference those cells). - Once the rooms are drawn, close the sketch and create a new sketch on the xy plane called "furniture". - Draw some rectangles for your sofas / tables / etc, delete any horizontal and vertical constraints that get automatically added (they look like little | and _ icons), and instead apply perpendicularity constraints. Dimension your rectangles using only the "constrain distance" tool. Now you can drag them around the room and rotate them freely. - If you want to make 3D models for these too, create new Part Design bodies for each room and each piece of furniture, create a shape binder referencing the master sketches in the Layout body, and then extrude the sketches using the "Pad" operation. That's about as much tutorial as it makes sense to pack into a HN comment. If you give it a try, I hope it works out for you!
  - fxff 11mo ago
    Approached it with the same attitude at the same time, after 10 minutes decided to view some basic tutorial (for an earlier release) that made things clear and I could continue basic tinkering on my own. But of course built-in intro of Solidworks was a way better UX.
  - mclau153 11mo ago
    if you try OnShape you will probably be much better off
  - sinker 11mo ago
    Sorry about the bad experience. If you decide to give it another try, it's worth spending a few hours on some intro tutorials first. I recommend MangoJelly on youtube. FC is not a program you can just open and start using, especially if you have zero experience with parametric modeling. If you're serious about design, modeling, engineering, etc., and want to own your own data, it's worth investing the hours to learn it starting from the very basics.
- Fabricio20 11mo ago
  I tried FreeCAD and the user interface is so unintuitive and things just have constraints that block you from doing the most basic things from the get-go that I just gave up in 10m, like sibling. SCAD is scripted/programmer CAD, I like the concept and have used for a few things but it's quite a learning curve to do anything more than a cube with some funny edges! Dune3D is currently my go-to for 3d-printer related parts!
  - entrox 11mo ago
    FreeCAD is definitely not something you can just pick up, but it's pretty intuitive if you're coming from CATIA as the workflow is very similar.
  - nirvdrum 11mo ago
    Have you tried since the 1.0 release? There were quite a few improvements that were locked behind weekly builds for a long time. AstoCAD[1] might be another option for you. It's basically FreeCAD with a streamlined UI. [1] -- https://www.astocad.com/ https://www.astocad.com/
- MattRix 11mo ago
  OpenSCAD is great, I’ve made some very complex stuff in it that would be hard to make even in professional tools like Fusion. For some reason the main OpenSCAD releases don’t seem to get updated (the current version on the site is 2021.x). The nightly builds are great though, and I recommend getting one and turning on the Manifold backend since it is MUCH faster than the default CGAL one.
  - WillAdams 11mo ago
    There is also: https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/
- the__alchemist 11mo ago
  I will phrase my response in an alternative form which, I mean not in a flippant way, but because I think it will clarify this, in complement to the other replies: > Mom, may we have SolidWorks? > We have SolidWorks at Home. > <SolidWorks at Home> This is in contrasti to the example the parent comment brought up, and the one I added: Blender and KiCad do not have this concern; there are free (Or you could say inexpensive) high quality tools in their spaces. This is notably not the case for traditional CAD.
daedrdev 11mo ago
Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience
- LoganDark 11mo ago
  I use Plasticity to model for 3D printing. Having to worry about polygons in Blender is really annoying.
  - cluckindan 11mo ago
    So model using the NURBS tools?
    - LoganDark 11mo ago
      Does Blender have NURBS? I don't even use NURBS in Plasticity, because curves are already essentially vectors. I don't have to worry about polygons at all, and then I choose the tolerances when I export.
- _carbyau_ 11mo ago
  During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to. Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons. I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in ease of use of this. Also, I'm not sure if the different tooling lets me see all the flaws of online "parametric" models, or whether I'm being pedantic. They get frustrating. I have Gordon-Ramsay-screamed "How can you fuck up a circle!".
  - jwagenet 11mo ago
    In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs vector (svg) graphics. Both can be generated procedurally by “parameters”, but only with svg can sub-features be faithfully extracted or transformed.
k1musab1 11mo ago
FreeCAD is the front-runner for me. KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.
  - RAMJAC 11mo ago
    While it's a pain to learn and requires some plugins (addons) for basic ergonomics, FreeCAD absolutely works for parametric CAD modeling. YMMV depending on the project and complexity, it does the trick for laser cutting, bending and 3D printing. Deltahedra is a great YouTube channel for getting the basics.
  - VerifiedReports 11mo ago
    It suffers from too many "workbenches," some of which appear to be redundant or dated. You never know whether structures created by one are "compatible" with the M.O. of another (like "Part" vs. "Part Design"). And it presents nonsensical problems, like offering to create a sketch on the face of an object and then complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object. So you have to manually drag it under the object in the treeview. So gallingly DUMB. Despite all that, I will wrestle with its ineptitude before giving Autodesk a penny. I get stuff done with it and respect those who give their time to develop it.
    - sinker 11mo ago
      Some of the basics aren't immediately obvious or even hinted at very well for new users, but the "problems" that come up are consistent with its own editing model. > complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object The sketch is by default attached to the "active body". Active Body is a simple, but important concept to understand. Any operation you do, including adding a sketch, is applied to what is designated as the active body. You designate the active body by right-clicking on the desired body in the object pane. > It suffers from too many "workbenches" Another understandably common source of confusion. There's the ever-confusing Part and Part Design workbenches. I think it's best to just ignore Part and use Part Design whenever possible. Part lets you do operations at a more granular level, but Part Design provides a lot more QOL enhancements and is more intuitive. For the vast majority of things, Part Design is more than capable. I would only use Part workbench when absolutely necessary. You probably understand all of this already. It's directed more towards the reader. I feel the need to defend FC when certain accusations are brought up. It's immensely powerful, capable, and usable. In my case, I can work very rapidly with it - though it's taken some time to arrive here. The project deserves more than just aspersions.
LoganDark 11mo ago
Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.
- lucideer 11mo ago
  Plasticity is closed source though?
dgroshev 11mo ago
Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful. 3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.
- LoganDark 11mo ago
  > Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Fornjot has been attempting this: https://www.fornjot.app https://www.fornjot.app It's going to be years or decades before it's competitive though. Also, it looks like they switched to keeping progress updates private except to sponsors, which means I don't actually have any easily-accessible information about it anymore which is sad.
  - dgroshev 11mo ago
    I'm very skeptical that one person can make a dent. Paging through the releases, they seem to focus on constructive solid geometry and code-driven shape generation, which I believe is a dead end. The tricky bit is having a G2 (or even G3) fillet that intersects a complex shape built from surface patches and thickened, with both projected into a new sketch, and keeping the workflow sane if I go and adjust the original fillet. I hope one day we'll see a free (as in speech) kernel that can enable that, until then it's just Parasolid, sadly.
    - throwrb 11mo ago
      Isn't their project boundary representation? I read a couple of your CAD comments, what an interesting space. It never occurred to me how complex computing 3d geometries is.
polishdude20 11mo ago
Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.
- SchemaLoad 11mo ago
  I really didn't like how they both require a phone number and make all of your files public. I've stuck with Fusion which seems a lot more privacy respecting while also being basically free for home users.
- edoceo 11mo ago
  Wish they had something between $0 and $1500/yr.
- Fabricio20 11mo ago
  I tried Onshape and the first thing that made me drop it was how slow it is. It feels extremely sluggish, probably because it's running on the browser. I have a really good computer though, so I dont want to deal with that.
  - Mashimo 11mo ago
    Mhh, it's quite quick for me. Maybe the browser you used did not support it.
- neutronicus 11mo ago
  OnShape is just another skin over Parasolid (closed-source geometry kernel sold by Siemens) like SolidWorks, VectorWorks, and others I forget. So it doesn't really represent meaningful progress towards FOSS CAD because ultimately it uses the same proprietary, expensive library to do the heavy lifting as most of its competitors.
Teever 11mo ago
You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead. Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program. I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel. It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.
shirro 11mo ago
Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows. It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now. Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.
- paxcoder 11mo ago
  [dead]
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  > It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now. Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/investment. > Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve Valve is not a rogue company. > Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back Your premise is wrong. It's impossible to leach off something that is freely given. This is like being angry because people don't all tip a street performer. The deal is it's free. And your facts are wrong. Businesses fund a giant amount of OSS work.
  - usrusr 11mo ago
    Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.
jwagenet 11mo ago
The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago
  On a scale from "big chunk of work" to "complete rewrite", how much work would it take to fix those issues in Open Cascade?
  - throwup238 11mo ago
    It would probably fall somewhere between "substantial architectural overhaul" and "partial rewrite" because it’d require redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges. Some of these issues are long standing and really hard to solve. Someone could probably defend an entire PhD thesis on “redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges” without making much practical progress
    - loftsy 11mo ago
      How do the other kernels e.g. Parasolid work without seam edges? Without a seam the 2D parametric boundary is not closed.
      - throwup238 11mo ago
        It’s not about seams in 2d but 3d curved surfaces. OpenCascade’s kernel forces you to deal with periodicity in topology (the shape structure), while Parasolid handles it in geometry (the math). A cylinder is mathematically continuous because there's no actual "seam" where it starts and ends. But in OpenCascade there’s a seam from 0 to 2π and this seam edge becomes a real topological entity that every algorithm has to deal with. In Parasolid the cylinder is periodic so when you query a point at U=2.1π, the kernel just knows that's equivalent to U=0.1π. The periodicity is a property of the surface math, not the shape structure. It’s not using polygons/edges/vertexes but a system of equations to calculate the surfaces. This is why boolean ops fail so often in FreeCAD: it’s asking the kernel to intersect with an artificial edge that shouldn't exist. The seam creates edge cases in intersection calculations, makes filleting near seams a nightmare, and complicates things. Parasolid's implicit handling requires smarter surface evaluation code upfront, but then everything else just works.
jiggawatts 11mo ago
Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA). The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc... This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc... Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.
- WillAdams 11mo ago
  Have you been tracking https://fornjot.app/ https://fornjot.app/ Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295690
  - jiggawatts 11mo ago
    I haven't heard of fornjot, but that's not a surprise because I haven't been involved in the CAD field for a very long time (decades). My thinking is to approach the problem from a fundamentally different angle. There's already constructive solid geometry (CSG) kernels, triangle mesh kernels, and NURBS-based kernels. Their mathematical foundations are very different, which results in wildly different behaviour and capabilities. I came across PGA while studying physics, saw some vaguely CAD-like CSG demos and I realised that it could be yet another mathematical foundation on top of which CAD applications could be built. Notably, variants of GA and PGA are already used in robotics, inverse kinematics, etc... including 5-axis milling, so it's not unheard of in industry. However, it's always used as a "spot" solution to work around a problem such as gimbal lock, or interpolating transformations. Typically by converting back-and-forth between linear algebra representations and some variant of GA temporarily. I'm thinking of using PGA throughout as the foundational geometric elements.
gcr 11mo ago
agreed! take a look at https://Plasticity.xyz https://Plasticity.xyz. It's not open-source, but it's got a small, highly dedicated team behind it. It's built on Solidworks' kernel, so it's quite robust. Also take a look at solverspace, caligula, FreeCAD, ...
- rcarmo 11mo ago
  * Node-locked (up to 2 machines) Hard nope.
  - cornstalks 11mo ago
    Reading the FAQ it doesn't seem to bad. The Indie license allows you to run it simultaneously on 2 machines and the Studio license increases that to 4. You can transfer installations to new computers (or the same computer if doing a reinstall) up to 10 times per year, so you're not locked in to those 2 specific computers for eternity. Restrictions are always annoying but I think they're striking a reasonable balance.
    - FloatArtifact 11mo ago
      The upgrade license pretty spendy at $175.
  - dgently7 11mo ago
    But a permanent license… that more than makes up for the node locked. I don’t have more than two machines I want to edit things like this on anyway. And even if I did I think it’s like 200$, which is like 1/6th of a month of Onshape.
Fabricio20 11mo ago
If you are looking for a tool that handles constraint based CAD for mostly like 3d printing your stuff, give Dune3D a try (on github), it's currently my go-to to keep a workflow similar to what I used to have on Fusion360, it's lightweight, open source and pretty damn good. The author also develops a EDA/circuit board designer called Horizon EDA.
- rmunn 11mo ago
  There's also the https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ addon for Blender, which is constraint-based. I tried it a few years ago and it was decent, but still lacking a few things. I haven't tried it recently, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't much improved from the already-pretty-good state it was in when I tried it.
- MayeulC 11mo ago
  Ah, interesting, it looks like Dune3D is based on solvespace with opencascade: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html I was going to suggest solvespace. It is very barebones, but was much easier to use than FreeCad for me. It also has constraints in 3D space, which I use a lot: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl
john_minsk 11mo ago
There is CAD Sketcher, which is an extension for Blender which could allow to unite both worlds. I'd like to hear someone's perspective on how difficult it would be to unify OpenUSD and CAD file formats so that they are portable between programs?
- TechSquidTV 11mo ago
  Last time I checked, CAD Sketcher appeared to be a little dead.
the__alchemist 11mo ago
As an addition, KiCad is also an example of exquisite Blender-like software for designing things. It solves a simpler problem of note. Both are paragons, and to your point, it would be lovely to have traditional CAD software on its level that's not expensive.
fsloth 11mo ago
"first class open source kernel" Speaking with over a decade of experience as a developer in industrial CAD (but still just one random guys point of view only). The question _isn't_ about the availability of a 3D kernel. 3D kernel is not the "moat". You can cross that with money. You can purchase a ACIS or Parasolid and you are off to the races. Or even use OpenCascade if you know what you are doing. The more interesting question is: Ok hotshot, you have a 3D kernel, 10M of investor money (or equivalent resources). What's your next move? What industry are you going to conquer? What are the problems you are going to solve better than the current tools do? What's the value you provide to the users except price? What are you going to do better than the incumbent softwares in relevant specific design industries? Which industry is your go-to-market? Etc etc. The programmer's view is "I will build a CAD". The industrial user on the other hand does _NOT_ want a "general CAD software". They want a tool with a specific, trainable workflow for their specific industrial use case. So "if you build it and they will come" will require speaking to a specific engineering/designer audience. You can of course build a generic tool (it's all watertight manifolds in the end) but the success in the market depends on the usual story about market forces. What's your go to market/beached. Does it enable you to move to other markets? And the answer usually is - NO. You need to build the market share in _each_ domain separately.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- gehsty 11mo ago
  I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc put weight into developing a open kernel and tooling at a volume similar to that of paying for licenses to Autodesk, then they could build their own hyper focussed CAD solution, and the rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.
  - fsloth 11mo ago
    (I’m going to reorder quotes from above) ” rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.” Just start coding your CAD tool dude if you want to! You can totally start with OpenCascade. All these kernels do is they 1) define tensor product surfaces (usually NURBs) with trimming curves 2) join these surface patches to watertight solids 3) export STEP (non-AM) or STL (AM) The question is which hardware manufacturing path is the one you know so well you know what the important things are? And the dirty secret here is that the 3D is _not_ the hardest part (it’s hard sure). You soon end up with schema management and database management as well as domain model challenges that are quite complicated. The main problem here will be that you can’t just start coding without knowing where you end up. You need to know _every step_ or you will end up in a quagmire that is no better than existing tools (slow, buggy). It’s totally doable but the total complexity will be non-trivial and the decisions you make year 1 will come haunt you and bite you in the ass year 5. Be prepared! And for those coming outside to this - I’m not being glib! A 3D design tool totally can be a one man show to start with (see NomadSculpt, Plasticity or MagicaVoxel for example). ” I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc…” I’m not sure what you are getting at. These companies created what we call CAD starting from the 1950’s or so (research Parson’s NC work at MIT, Bezier’s work later at Renault if you want a wikipedia tour of the early years). The current industry isn’t shaped like this because Dassault, Siemens and Autodesk decided to go all incumbent. They were more or less pushed to do so by market forces and industrial history (and if it was not them some other company would be the incumbents).
h14h 11mo ago
I did a lot of parametric 3D CAD work in college as a MechE student, and switched to webdev after graduating. Recently, I had a hobby project that would have involved dusting off my CAD skills, and was bummed to find that there wasn't any software readily available that allowed me to lean on muscle memory I had built up using Inventor/Creo/SolidWorks/Unigraphics. A viable OSS alternative, particularly one that prioritizes simplicity and being a gentle on-ramp for hobbyists, would be fantastic. It wouldn't need (and I would argue shouldn't attempt) to compete with the big for-profit outfits to be useful either. Offering a simplified UX for the most-used features of the pro software would have a ton of utility, while also being a great place to build the foundational skills you need in order to master the more complex stuff. Furthermore, a project with the mission of complementing the pro tools rather than replacing them would probably be far more likely to succeed, IMO. As long as projects could be exported to variety of formats and brought into some other software when a specific use-case arises, you'd have all your bases covered.
sinker 11mo ago
FreeCAD is still in active development and there was a major release (1.0) recently. There will be a feature freeze soon where the devs will focus primarily on stability and eliminating bugs. That said, I use FC as my main CAD driver and, not only tolerate it, but enjoy using it. I had to watch several hours of introductory videos to get the hang of things initially, but now I'm quite fast and proficient. The initial pains and common complaints about UI and such, are basically non-issues for me now and when I model, my cognitive energy is basically devoted to the design problem itself rather than issues with UI or the behavior of the software. It's necessary to put the time into learning it, but it's worth it.

by gehsty 11mo ago

1220512064 11mo ago

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

al_borland 11mo ago
I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.
- mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
  Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.
  - al_borland 11mo ago
    My main goal is to reproduce the floor plan of my house, so I can figure out how to best layout the furniture.
    - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
      I like using paper and cardboard for this, dollhouse style, much easier to move things around and visualize that way and more fun than clicking a mouse to boot :^) Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho
      - al_borland 11mo ago
        This was my plan B. I do have a scale I can use for it. I’ll check out Inkscape as well. I’ve tried using some raster graphics in the past, but I couldn’t type dimensions and had to use the rules and guides with snapping. It mostly worked, but was a bit annoying.
    - mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
      I actually did the same thing so that I could figure out how to lay out my workshop! What I'd do is: - Spreadsheet workbench --> Create spreadsheet (name it "measurements"). (This is optional) - Switch to Part design workbench --> Create body (name it "layout") --> select XY plane --> Create sketch --> Create Polyline - Zoom out, start drawing the rooms in your house, approximately to scale. - Before going into too much detail, add a dimension (select line --> "Constrain Distance") to the first line you draw, so that you can do the rest of your drawing approximately to scale. Then the general shape won't get messed up when you add dimensions to everything else. - (If you have a photo or picture, you can import that to sketch over). - Add constraints to match your room measurements, mostly vertical or horizontal distance constraints. Be careful not to overconstrain the sketch. (You can put the measurements directly into the sketch constraints, or you can put them into the top-level spreadsheet, create an alias for each cells, and then set the dimensions to reference those cells). - Once the rooms are drawn, close the sketch and create a new sketch on the xy plane called "furniture". - Draw some rectangles for your sofas / tables / etc, delete any horizontal and vertical constraints that get automatically added (they look like little | and _ icons), and instead apply perpendicularity constraints. Dimension your rectangles using only the "constrain distance" tool. Now you can drag them around the room and rotate them freely. - If you want to make 3D models for these too, create new Part Design bodies for each room and each piece of furniture, create a shape binder referencing the master sketches in the Layout body, and then extrude the sketches using the "Pad" operation. That's about as much tutorial as it makes sense to pack into a HN comment. If you give it a try, I hope it works out for you!
- fxff 11mo ago
  Approached it with the same attitude at the same time, after 10 minutes decided to view some basic tutorial (for an earlier release) that made things clear and I could continue basic tinkering on my own. But of course built-in intro of Solidworks was a way better UX.
- mclau153 11mo ago
  if you try OnShape you will probably be much better off
- sinker 11mo ago
  Sorry about the bad experience. If you decide to give it another try, it's worth spending a few hours on some intro tutorials first. I recommend MangoJelly on youtube. FC is not a program you can just open and start using, especially if you have zero experience with parametric modeling. If you're serious about design, modeling, engineering, etc., and want to own your own data, it's worth investing the hours to learn it starting from the very basics.
Fabricio20 11mo ago
I tried FreeCAD and the user interface is so unintuitive and things just have constraints that block you from doing the most basic things from the get-go that I just gave up in 10m, like sibling. SCAD is scripted/programmer CAD, I like the concept and have used for a few things but it's quite a learning curve to do anything more than a cube with some funny edges! Dune3D is currently my go-to for 3d-printer related parts!
- entrox 11mo ago
  FreeCAD is definitely not something you can just pick up, but it's pretty intuitive if you're coming from CATIA as the workflow is very similar.
- nirvdrum 11mo ago
  Have you tried since the 1.0 release? There were quite a few improvements that were locked behind weekly builds for a long time. AstoCAD[1] might be another option for you. It's basically FreeCAD with a streamlined UI. [1] -- https://www.astocad.com/ https://www.astocad.com/
MattRix 11mo ago
OpenSCAD is great, I’ve made some very complex stuff in it that would be hard to make even in professional tools like Fusion. For some reason the main OpenSCAD releases don’t seem to get updated (the current version on the site is 2021.x). The nightly builds are great though, and I recommend getting one and turning on the Manifold backend since it is MUCH faster than the default CGAL one.
- WillAdams 11mo ago
  There is also: https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/
the__alchemist 11mo ago
I will phrase my response in an alternative form which, I mean not in a flippant way, but because I think it will clarify this, in complement to the other replies: > Mom, may we have SolidWorks? > We have SolidWorks at Home. > <SolidWorks at Home> This is in contrasti to the example the parent comment brought up, and the one I added: Blender and KiCad do not have this concern; there are free (Or you could say inexpensive) high quality tools in their spaces. This is notably not the case for traditional CAD.

daedrdev 11mo ago

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

LoganDark 11mo ago
I use Plasticity to model for 3D printing. Having to worry about polygons in Blender is really annoying.
- cluckindan 11mo ago
  So model using the NURBS tools?
  - LoganDark 11mo ago
    Does Blender have NURBS? I don't even use NURBS in Plasticity, because curves are already essentially vectors. I don't have to worry about polygons at all, and then I choose the tolerances when I export.
_carbyau_ 11mo ago
During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to. Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons. I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in ease of use of this. Also, I'm not sure if the different tooling lets me see all the flaws of online "parametric" models, or whether I'm being pedantic. They get frustrating. I have Gordon-Ramsay-screamed "How can you fuck up a circle!".
- jwagenet 11mo ago
  In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs vector (svg) graphics. Both can be generated procedurally by “parameters”, but only with svg can sub-features be faithfully extracted or transformed.

k1musab1 11mo ago

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me. KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

Workaccount2 11mo ago
FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.
- RAMJAC 11mo ago
  While it's a pain to learn and requires some plugins (addons) for basic ergonomics, FreeCAD absolutely works for parametric CAD modeling. YMMV depending on the project and complexity, it does the trick for laser cutting, bending and 3D printing. Deltahedra is a great YouTube channel for getting the basics.
- VerifiedReports 11mo ago
  It suffers from too many "workbenches," some of which appear to be redundant or dated. You never know whether structures created by one are "compatible" with the M.O. of another (like "Part" vs. "Part Design"). And it presents nonsensical problems, like offering to create a sketch on the face of an object and then complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object. So you have to manually drag it under the object in the treeview. So gallingly DUMB. Despite all that, I will wrestle with its ineptitude before giving Autodesk a penny. I get stuff done with it and respect those who give their time to develop it.
  - sinker 11mo ago
    Some of the basics aren't immediately obvious or even hinted at very well for new users, but the "problems" that come up are consistent with its own editing model. > complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object The sketch is by default attached to the "active body". Active Body is a simple, but important concept to understand. Any operation you do, including adding a sketch, is applied to what is designated as the active body. You designate the active body by right-clicking on the desired body in the object pane. > It suffers from too many "workbenches" Another understandably common source of confusion. There's the ever-confusing Part and Part Design workbenches. I think it's best to just ignore Part and use Part Design whenever possible. Part lets you do operations at a more granular level, but Part Design provides a lot more QOL enhancements and is more intuitive. For the vast majority of things, Part Design is more than capable. I would only use Part workbench when absolutely necessary. You probably understand all of this already. It's directed more towards the reader. I feel the need to defend FC when certain accusations are brought up. It's immensely powerful, capable, and usable. In my case, I can work very rapidly with it - though it's taken some time to arrive here. The project deserves more than just aspersions.

LoganDark 11mo ago

Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.

lucideer 11mo ago
Plasticity is closed source though?

dgroshev 11mo ago

Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful. 3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.

LoganDark 11mo ago
> Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Fornjot has been attempting this: https://www.fornjot.app https://www.fornjot.app It's going to be years or decades before it's competitive though. Also, it looks like they switched to keeping progress updates private except to sponsors, which means I don't actually have any easily-accessible information about it anymore which is sad.
- dgroshev 11mo ago
  I'm very skeptical that one person can make a dent. Paging through the releases, they seem to focus on constructive solid geometry and code-driven shape generation, which I believe is a dead end. The tricky bit is having a G2 (or even G3) fillet that intersects a complex shape built from surface patches and thickened, with both projected into a new sketch, and keeping the workflow sane if I go and adjust the original fillet. I hope one day we'll see a free (as in speech) kernel that can enable that, until then it's just Parasolid, sadly.
  - throwrb 11mo ago
    Isn't their project boundary representation? I read a couple of your CAD comments, what an interesting space. It never occurred to me how complex computing 3d geometries is.

polishdude20 11mo ago

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

SchemaLoad 11mo ago
I really didn't like how they both require a phone number and make all of your files public. I've stuck with Fusion which seems a lot more privacy respecting while also being basically free for home users.
edoceo 11mo ago
Wish they had something between $0 and $1500/yr.
Fabricio20 11mo ago
I tried Onshape and the first thing that made me drop it was how slow it is. It feels extremely sluggish, probably because it's running on the browser. I have a really good computer though, so I dont want to deal with that.
- Mashimo 11mo ago
  Mhh, it's quite quick for me. Maybe the browser you used did not support it.
neutronicus 11mo ago
OnShape is just another skin over Parasolid (closed-source geometry kernel sold by Siemens) like SolidWorks, VectorWorks, and others I forget. So it doesn't really represent meaningful progress towards FOSS CAD because ultimately it uses the same proprietary, expensive library to do the heavy lifting as most of its competitors.

Teever 11mo ago

You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead. Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program. I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel. It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.

shirro 11mo ago

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows. It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now. Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.

paxcoder 11mo ago
[dead]
philipallstar 11mo ago
> It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now. Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/investment. > Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve Valve is not a rogue company. > Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back Your premise is wrong. It's impossible to leach off something that is freely given. This is like being angry because people don't all tip a street performer. The deal is it's free. And your facts are wrong. Businesses fund a giant amount of OSS work.
- usrusr 11mo ago
  Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.

jwagenet 11mo ago

The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.

JoshTriplett 11mo ago
On a scale from "big chunk of work" to "complete rewrite", how much work would it take to fix those issues in Open Cascade?
- throwup238 11mo ago
  It would probably fall somewhere between "substantial architectural overhaul" and "partial rewrite" because it’d require redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges. Some of these issues are long standing and really hard to solve. Someone could probably defend an entire PhD thesis on “redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges” without making much practical progress
  - loftsy 11mo ago
    How do the other kernels e.g. Parasolid work without seam edges? Without a seam the 2D parametric boundary is not closed.
    - throwup238 11mo ago
      It’s not about seams in 2d but 3d curved surfaces. OpenCascade’s kernel forces you to deal with periodicity in topology (the shape structure), while Parasolid handles it in geometry (the math). A cylinder is mathematically continuous because there's no actual "seam" where it starts and ends. But in OpenCascade there’s a seam from 0 to 2π and this seam edge becomes a real topological entity that every algorithm has to deal with. In Parasolid the cylinder is periodic so when you query a point at U=2.1π, the kernel just knows that's equivalent to U=0.1π. The periodicity is a property of the surface math, not the shape structure. It’s not using polygons/edges/vertexes but a system of equations to calculate the surfaces. This is why boolean ops fail so often in FreeCAD: it’s asking the kernel to intersect with an artificial edge that shouldn't exist. The seam creates edge cases in intersection calculations, makes filleting near seams a nightmare, and complicates things. Parasolid's implicit handling requires smarter surface evaluation code upfront, but then everything else just works.

jiggawatts 11mo ago

Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA). The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc... This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc... Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.

WillAdams 11mo ago
Have you been tracking https://fornjot.app/ https://fornjot.app/ Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295690
- jiggawatts 11mo ago
  I haven't heard of fornjot, but that's not a surprise because I haven't been involved in the CAD field for a very long time (decades). My thinking is to approach the problem from a fundamentally different angle. There's already constructive solid geometry (CSG) kernels, triangle mesh kernels, and NURBS-based kernels. Their mathematical foundations are very different, which results in wildly different behaviour and capabilities. I came across PGA while studying physics, saw some vaguely CAD-like CSG demos and I realised that it could be yet another mathematical foundation on top of which CAD applications could be built. Notably, variants of GA and PGA are already used in robotics, inverse kinematics, etc... including 5-axis milling, so it's not unheard of in industry. However, it's always used as a "spot" solution to work around a problem such as gimbal lock, or interpolating transformations. Typically by converting back-and-forth between linear algebra representations and some variant of GA temporarily. I'm thinking of using PGA throughout as the foundational geometric elements.

gcr 11mo ago

agreed! take a look at https://Plasticity.xyz https://Plasticity.xyz. It's not open-source, but it's got a small, highly dedicated team behind it. It's built on Solidworks' kernel, so it's quite robust. Also take a look at solverspace, caligula, FreeCAD, ...

rcarmo 11mo ago
* Node-locked (up to 2 machines) Hard nope.
- cornstalks 11mo ago
  Reading the FAQ it doesn't seem to bad. The Indie license allows you to run it simultaneously on 2 machines and the Studio license increases that to 4. You can transfer installations to new computers (or the same computer if doing a reinstall) up to 10 times per year, so you're not locked in to those 2 specific computers for eternity. Restrictions are always annoying but I think they're striking a reasonable balance.
  - FloatArtifact 11mo ago
    The upgrade license pretty spendy at $175.
- dgently7 11mo ago
  But a permanent license… that more than makes up for the node locked. I don’t have more than two machines I want to edit things like this on anyway. And even if I did I think it’s like 200$, which is like 1/6th of a month of Onshape.

Fabricio20 11mo ago

If you are looking for a tool that handles constraint based CAD for mostly like 3d printing your stuff, give Dune3D a try (on github), it's currently my go-to to keep a workflow similar to what I used to have on Fusion360, it's lightweight, open source and pretty damn good. The author also develops a EDA/circuit board designer called Horizon EDA.

rmunn 11mo ago
There's also the https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ addon for Blender, which is constraint-based. I tried it a few years ago and it was decent, but still lacking a few things. I haven't tried it recently, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't much improved from the already-pretty-good state it was in when I tried it.
MayeulC 11mo ago
Ah, interesting, it looks like Dune3D is based on solvespace with opencascade: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html I was going to suggest solvespace. It is very barebones, but was much easier to use than FreeCad for me. It also has constraints in 3D space, which I use a lot: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl

john_minsk 11mo ago

There is CAD Sketcher, which is an extension for Blender which could allow to unite both worlds. I'd like to hear someone's perspective on how difficult it would be to unify OpenUSD and CAD file formats so that they are portable between programs?

TechSquidTV 11mo ago
Last time I checked, CAD Sketcher appeared to be a little dead.

the__alchemist 11mo ago

As an addition, KiCad is also an example of exquisite Blender-like software for designing things. It solves a simpler problem of note. Both are paragons, and to your point, it would be lovely to have traditional CAD software on its level that's not expensive.

fsloth 11mo ago

"first class open source kernel" Speaking with over a decade of experience as a developer in industrial CAD (but still just one random guys point of view only). The question _isn't_ about the availability of a 3D kernel. 3D kernel is not the "moat". You can cross that with money. You can purchase a ACIS or Parasolid and you are off to the races. Or even use OpenCascade if you know what you are doing. The more interesting question is: Ok hotshot, you have a 3D kernel, 10M of investor money (or equivalent resources). What's your next move? What industry are you going to conquer? What are the problems you are going to solve better than the current tools do? What's the value you provide to the users except price? What are you going to do better than the incumbent softwares in relevant specific design industries? Which industry is your go-to-market? Etc etc. The programmer's view is "I will build a CAD". The industrial user on the other hand does _NOT_ want a "general CAD software". They want a tool with a specific, trainable workflow for their specific industrial use case. So "if you build it and they will come" will require speaking to a specific engineering/designer audience. You can of course build a generic tool (it's all watertight manifolds in the end) but the success in the market depends on the usual story about market forces. What's your go to market/beached. Does it enable you to move to other markets? And the answer usually is - NO. You need to build the market share in _each_ domain separately.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
gehsty 11mo ago
I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc put weight into developing a open kernel and tooling at a volume similar to that of paying for licenses to Autodesk, then they could build their own hyper focussed CAD solution, and the rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.
- fsloth 11mo ago
  (I’m going to reorder quotes from above) ” rest of us could be "off to the races" without the upfront cost ACIS or Parasolid.” Just start coding your CAD tool dude if you want to! You can totally start with OpenCascade. All these kernels do is they 1) define tensor product surfaces (usually NURBs) with trimming curves 2) join these surface patches to watertight solids 3) export STEP (non-AM) or STL (AM) The question is which hardware manufacturing path is the one you know so well you know what the important things are? And the dirty secret here is that the 3D is _not_ the hardest part (it’s hard sure). You soon end up with schema management and database management as well as domain model challenges that are quite complicated. The main problem here will be that you can’t just start coding without knowing where you end up. You need to know _every step_ or you will end up in a quagmire that is no better than existing tools (slow, buggy). It’s totally doable but the total complexity will be non-trivial and the decisions you make year 1 will come haunt you and bite you in the ass year 5. Be prepared! And for those coming outside to this - I’m not being glib! A 3D design tool totally can be a one man show to start with (see NomadSculpt, Plasticity or MagicaVoxel for example). ” I guess what I mean is that if the likes of huge defence contractors / automotive industry etc…” I’m not sure what you are getting at. These companies created what we call CAD starting from the 1950’s or so (research Parson’s NC work at MIT, Bezier’s work later at Renault if you want a wikipedia tour of the early years). The current industry isn’t shaped like this because Dassault, Siemens and Autodesk decided to go all incumbent. They were more or less pushed to do so by market forces and industrial history (and if it was not them some other company would be the incumbents).

h14h 11mo ago

I did a lot of parametric 3D CAD work in college as a MechE student, and switched to webdev after graduating. Recently, I had a hobby project that would have involved dusting off my CAD skills, and was bummed to find that there wasn't any software readily available that allowed me to lean on muscle memory I had built up using Inventor/Creo/SolidWorks/Unigraphics. A viable OSS alternative, particularly one that prioritizes simplicity and being a gentle on-ramp for hobbyists, would be fantastic. It wouldn't need (and I would argue shouldn't attempt) to compete with the big for-profit outfits to be useful either. Offering a simplified UX for the most-used features of the pro software would have a ton of utility, while also being a great place to build the foundational skills you need in order to master the more complex stuff. Furthermore, a project with the mission of complementing the pro tools rather than replacing them would probably be far more likely to succeed, IMO. As long as projects could be exported to variety of formats and brought into some other software when a specific use-case arises, you'd have all your bases covered.

sinker 11mo ago

FreeCAD is still in active development and there was a major release (1.0) recently. There will be a feature freeze soon where the devs will focus primarily on stability and eliminating bugs. That said, I use FC as my main CAD driver and, not only tolerate it, but enjoy using it. I had to watch several hours of introductory videos to get the hang of things initially, but now I'm quite fast and proficient. The initial pains and common complaints about UI and such, are basically non-issues for me now and when I model, my cognitive energy is basically devoted to the design problem itself rather than issues with UI or the behavior of the software. It's necessary to put the time into learning it, but it's worth it.