6 ms·
GenCAD
- knollimar 5mo agoIt says "can convert cad latents into a sequence of parametric CAD commands" Which CAD program? I'm confused Am I reading this right? >Most importantly, GenCAD does not merely generate a 3D solid but also the entire CAD program.
- lagrange77 5mo ago> Which CAD program? Doesn't matter. CAD models/objects are represented by a sequence of operations on a primitive or sketch. Unlike meshes, that describe the manifested resulting shape of objects in 3D programs like Blender. So it's about the fact, that their model outputs that hierarchy of operations. The history of development, not just the result.
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoHow does it not matter? Every CAD program is not going to have exactly the same interface and commands. I doubt for example this will for example generate and OpenSCAD text file.
- plumeria 5mo agoIt could be used as pseudo-code for LLMs to produce specific CAD commands?
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoIt could be anything which is why the question was asked what it actually outputs. I had a skim through the page and code but couldn't see what the output was.
- martinpw 5mo agoIt will still be application dependent. Code to compute fillets and blends gets incredibly complex when multiple surfaces are involved. And when surfaces are barely intersecting, or almost coincident, all bets are off what the command will do - very much depends on the geometry kernel and the tolerances it uses whether it decides the surfaces even intersect. And if it decides they don't intersect, all downstream commands will fail. Handling tolerances is one of the hardest aspects of CAD. (It's no coincidence that most open source CAD applications always demo with the same relatively basic types of models - they just can't do truly complex CAD.) So a simple set of operations - cube, sphere, intersect - sure that will work anywhere and will be portable across applications and makes a nice simple demo. But once you start doing any serious CAD modeling the result is kernel dependent. That's why portable CAD formats like STEP do not preserve the commands used to generate the results. And why native CAD application formats do preserve the command history but are not portable across applications.
- plumeria 5mo agoideally, fillets are the last operations in the sequence. could the sequence of operations follow a topological ordering that makes it kernel independent?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- itishappy 5mo agoNothing stops you from storing a history of mesh operations. This is exactly what modifiers (including geometry nodes) do in Blender today.
- dbcurtis 5mo ago> Which CAD program? I'm confused Clue here: > Our proposed GenCAD architecture... So, at this point, it seems like this will work with all CAD programs, since they have yet to encounter any systems that they can't work with. More seriously, my guess would be whatever one is available for free in their lab. Kind of standard operating procedure for academic projects -- do a proof of concept, make a video that avoids known bugs, get a grade, push source to git, graduate. Good ideas come out of that... production code... eh... maybe. More likely someone ends up in the situation that my kid did, previous graduate student's git repo is stale by 2 versions of C++, and 4 versions of ROS, and neither of the two unit tests still work after porting.
- hug 5mo agoIt's DeepCAD* output, it looks like, which is a JSON payload that is the sketch / extrude / whatever steps, which is itself based on Onshape output. Looks like you can go JSON -> step files, but not really in such a way that you can modify any of the operations. * https://github.com/mightyhorst/DeepCAD https://github.com/mightyhorst/DeepCAD
- mamami 5mo agoIdeally it would tie in with an llm, no? Like you would want to be able to say something like "create a design of car suspension subject to x,y,z contrains"
- cush 5mo agoThe input is images, and the output is CAD models, so it appears you could use a multi-modal LLM to natural language -> image -> CAD
- simpleintheory 5mo agoIs this Google-affiliated? The heading font is Product/Google Sans which IIRC only Alphabet is allowed to use and the entire webpage seems to be Google-style but neither of the two named researchers seem to be employed by Google?
- vpzom 5mo agoPer https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans/license https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans/license "These fonts are licensed under the Open Font License. You can use them in your products & projects – print or digital, commercial or otherwise."
- simpleintheory 5mo agoYeah, TIL, turns out they changed the license: it used to be under https://fonts.google.com/license/productsans https://fonts.google.com/license/productsans
- ironhaven 5mo agoA another take on this problem is zoo.dev . They wrote a brand new from scratch cad engine that is driven a custom openscad style language called kcl. Then then have a trained llm that has can generate kcl to either create new parts or act as a llm assistant for changes to existing parts. It’s neat that llms can do 3-D but I wonder how much of the problem is integration.
- cjtrowbridge 5mo agoThis has been easy with OpenSCAD for a long time. I have made lots of cool, complex models this way. I built a repo of the prompts I use to show the llm how to do this and it includes many of the models I've created this way... https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling
- jvanderbot 5mo agoSame. Working with an LLM and OpenSCAD has been totally painless.
- richk449 5mo agoI’ve been using cadquery and build123 with Claude code and I find it incredibly painful. What is your workflow for llm integration to openscad?
- pdntspa 5mo agoNot OP but I just ask Claude Code to make me an openscad file. If I need changes I ask for them in plain english. If you are specific, it's not the quickest loop but it works. I usually ask it to parameterize the model enough so that I can quickly print small prototypes in my 3d printer. Once I am happy with the mini version I print the full-size model.
- jacobn 5mo agoI just ask it for what I’m looking for (doing very simple “spare part” level at home 3d printing, nothing fancy or elaborate) and it gives me a starting point. Then I sometimes just edit the scad code by hand, and some times I ask the AI to revise, sometimes a mix (many iterations). For very simple geometries it works great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a disconnect between “LLM views image” and “LLM emits scad that looks like that image” when it comes to anything non-trivial. Still gives me a starting point I can mess with, which is great since I have zero CAD training or experience. (I’m not the commenter you replied to)
- ugh123 5mo agoThe examples they show are so basic.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoYeah they’re basically a single extrude of the sketch
- ecto 5mo agoReaders may also enjoy my open source Rust BRep CAD kernel https://github.com/ecto/vcad https://github.com/ecto/vcad or the hosted version at https://vcad.io https://vcad.io. I also wrote a bit about what goes into CAD apps! https://campedersen.com/tessellation https://campedersen.com/tessellation
- ecto 5mo ago(forgot to mention, it's wired up to Claude so you can vibe CAD, like OP but with a few more steps - I'd like to train a similar model soon! I also wrote about my first stab at this https://campedersen.com/cad0 https://campedersen.com/cad0)
- vincent-uden 5mo agoSeeing as I'm attempting to build my own CAD program in Rust I checked out the hosted website. I'm not really sure what is supposed to be working and what isn't. I can't help but to be skeptical of one person writing ~115k LOC in 4 months which is just the Rust crates, nevermind the frontend (which is another 100k LOC!!!). I'm curious why you decided to go with "eager" tessellation. Creating a circle immediately results in a bunch of lines which resemble a circle but would fail under tangency constraints quickly. Is this a current limitation or part of the strategy for the kernel?
- clmul 5mo agoAs someone also working on CAD in their spare time, also tried the hosted app. I get the feeling that this is made by someone who has never opened a (professional) CAD app at all. It feels like a mix between a tool like blender and CSG-style CAD, but even all of that doesn't seem to work. Maybe this is the proof that vibe coding does not work, at least not for this kind of application. In my own project I use LLMs very sparingly and hesitantly, but made the observation that they are not very useful on the hard parts of CAD. I expect this is because of a lack of training material. Most professional CAD applications are proprietary and books on the topic are usually sparse on implementation details. The non-BRep CAD applications such as OpenSCAD and family are probably overrepresented in the training data. This might also explain why people's experiences with LLMs are very varied. If you stay in the happy path of CRUD web development and stuff all is nice and well, but if you start to veer off this path you get more and more challenged.
- geuis 5mo agoTo the author if they happen to see this. Please kill the auto playing video. If someone is listening to something else on their phone this always takes over and interrupts.
- whatsupdog 5mo agoTIL: people are still browsing the internet without an ad blocker.
- cassianoleal 5mo agoDoesn’t even have to go that far. TIL people are still browsing the internet without disabling auto-play on their browsers.
- culi 5mo agoShould be disabled by default tbh.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoHow do you use an actually effective ad blocker on the iPhone?
- geuis 5mo agoI use 2 and they work very well. No options for auto playing videos though. 1Blocker and AdGuard. For 1Blocker I have everything enabled except adult content and scripts. AdGuard has everything turned off except for General. These are just the free versions too. I've been using this setup for a few years and it works close to 100% of the time.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoI have Adguard and still get YouTube ads. Does 1Block fix that?
- achllle 5mo agoI wanted to see how well it performed on real pictures of parts or hand-drawn drawings, but when I tried setting up the docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed. The examples make me suspect it doesn't work well beyond images that were generated from CAD in the first place.
- atoav 5mo agoIf only there was some kind of container that allowed you to bundle all your dependencies together with your software.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoThat thing is called Nix
- coldtea 5mo agoParent said "bundle"
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoNix to give you reproducable builds. Docker to bundle. Docker files alone is usually full of aptgets and curlshs. Which might be why the docker image wont build.
- xiaoyu2006 5mo ago> docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed Ironically the former is engineered to avoid the latter.
- sjjsjsvdd 5mo ago[dead]
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
- Riany 5mo agothe idea is good, but the examples still feel like a distance to handle real constraints and dimensions
- nik282000 5mo agoWebsite renders so poorly on my phone that I cant read half the text. Fits the bill for a slop project.
- isaisabella 5mo agoThe demo seems pretty cool, but also pretty simple. When it comes to complicate models, I afriad it would be hard to generate the accurate 3D model.
- clippy99 5mo agoMaybe I missed something, if you have the image rendering in the first place, you already (likely) have the CAD. It is a nice demo, but what is the utility?
- soupspaces 5mo agogenerate from sketch or replicate a part you don't have
- andrew_kwak 5mo agoChecked out GenCAD. It seems pretty useful for simple circuit designs. Wondering if it supports import/export with other CAD formats?
- jrflo 5mo agoNeat, but I don't really see the utility. The time consuming part of CAD drawing comes from figuring out the correct dimensions of each feature, spacing, sizing, tolerances, etc., and constraining the drawing in a way so that it's easy to tweak later on- which this doesn't do at all. Maybe you could draw a 2d sketch of what you want then generate it, but you'd still have to do the hard part.
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agoIf down the line this model could create 3D model from 2D images that would be very neat way to pay less for war gaming models
- semi-extrinsic 5mo agoYou can already do this with apps like Kira. I believe it is especially good on the iPhone variants with LiDAR.
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agoI dont know that app specifically, but from all videos of different lidar and other 3d scanning tools I have seen the results are pretty bad and require a lot of sculpting after the scan. Whole point was that with few images the ML model could construct the actual 3d model for you
- protocolture 5mo agoAlready done. Cults generally has stls of 40k models before release. Its just a matter of finding them.
- nextlevelwizard 5mo agodoesnt really help if I cant find them and I guess if I could find them so could GW and they would be taken down. Having an application you can host at home that could do the job from pictures would be awesome
- zkmon 5mo agoHow are the input images generated?
- abstract257 5mo ago[dead]
- hspeiser 5mo agoI spent a few hours trying to get this to work, and I couldn’t get it to produce usable results on anything except the training data, even with very simple drawings. I noticed in the GitHub that they mention it is only around 60% reliable even on their own training data, but the image shown on the front page feels pretty misleading. I made 10 images that were very similar in complexity to the examples shown, and even after running it around 50 times on each image, not a single one worked correctly. In the rare cases where it produced something, the output was completely wrong. This seems pretty misleading in its current state and definitely needs more work.
- ololobus 5mo agoI’m also confused by their examples. All of them seem to be perfect renders/exports from 3D models — this is not the use case where I see it the most useful. Making a parametrized CAD model out of a hand-drawn sketch — yes, please
- galangalalgol 5mo agoI have tried getting claude to generate openscad for sketches it does poorly. But that would be great
- SpaceNoodled 5mo agoOne method that I found works really well for OpenSCAD is learning its syntax and features and making the models myself based on my own sketches.
- Karliss 5mo agoWhen skimming a research paper in addition to abstract don't forget to read "limitations and future work" and "conclusions". In the limitation section they are quite direct with it: "images used .. are mostly isometric and noise-free CAD-images" and "limited CAD vocabulary used in this study needs to be extended by including more sophisticated CAD tokens such as revolve operation, edge operation (e.g., fillets/chamfers)". It currently supports only series of pads (can be subtractive). Many simple beginner exercises of seemingly similar complexity don't fit those constraints. Some of the parts shown could be more naturally created using wider set of tools, but technically can be created using only pads. So even if you tried with clean screenshot of simple 3d model, it will likely fail if camera settings aren't right, and it will fail if model can't be represented using series of pad operations. Anything containing spheres, cones, nearly all lathe parts, fillets which can't be included in 2d sketches will fail. In theory arbitrary extrusion angles are supported, but all examples showed only axis aligned parts. That said I wouldn't be surprised if it failed even if you considered exact limitations not just similar complexity in your attempts. Assuming images in the googledrive are the training data, "mostly isometric and noise-free CAD images" is a bit of understatement. All of them are at very specific angles using and single style. Specific solid gray infill color for "images", and white infill with weird shading around perimeter for "sketches". Both with white background and pixelated non antialised 1px lines. No reason to expect it capable of processing anything which doesn't have exactly same visual style. For practical product that would have to be solved but that wasn't really the point of this research. All the style transference papers have show that it's more or less solvable problem, but for a paper exploring what model architecture and 3d representation could work best for AI cad it seems like unnecessary distraction that would only bloat the training costs and time. Most annoying part is that it makes hard to test the model with your own inputs.
- Lapsa 5mo ago"In 1975, Dr. Joseph Sharp proved that correct modulation of microwave energy can result in wireless and receiverless transmission of audible speech."
- dang 5mo agoCan you please stop posting about this issue? You've unfortunately been doing it excessively, including many repetitive comments. That's not a good use of HN. I don't mean to come across as personally critical. From your comments it sounds possible (I am not sure, of course) that you have been having some distressing experiences. If so, we hope things improve. But please don't post these comments to HN - they aren't on topic here, and they're not an effective way to address the situation.
- Lapsa 5mo agowhat would you presume would be an effective way to address the situation? have tried just about everything
- dang 5mo agoI can't presume anything, but from my limited perspective, what might work better is connecting with someone that you can talk with in person. Re your other comment: I am sure it is a serious issue, although I don't understand it. It's just not an issue that can be solved through internet forum threads like HN.
- Lapsa 5mo agonow you just communication channel shaming. what's wrong with internet forums? do you act on them principally different than in person? you should try to understand it - it's very serious. capitalism and democracy is at stake
- dang 5mo agoI'm very sorry, but we can't have you continuing to post comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204766. It's not good for the community and it's not in your interest, so I've banned this account for the time being. Hopefully things will get better and we can unban it at some point.
- physicsguy 5mo agoThis is over a year old now, why post now? There have been other advancements in this area.
- john_minsk 5mo agoCould you please share?
- physicsguy 5mo agoFor e.g.: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04337 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04337 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05607 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05607 https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01171 https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01171 For a more detailed review: https://github.com/lichengzhanguom/LLMs-CAD-Survey-Taxonomy https://github.com/lichengzhanguom/LLMs-CAD-Survey-Taxonomy
- dajt 5mo agoI'm stumped by things like this. The drawing & modelling are not the difficult bit - the CAM programming is. That seems difficult enough that I have not found an open source program to load a 3D model and allow me to set the toolpaths in a UI, never mind have an LLM generate them from the model.
- regularfry 5mo agoThat's a completely different difficult problem, and totally dependent on the manufacturing process. CNC? Sure. FDM from the same .step? Almost entirely irrelevant, that's the slicer's job. SLA? Doesn't make sense to ask the question.
- throwup238 5mo ago> The drawing & modelling are not the difficult bit - the CAM programming is. Actually the drawing and modeling are very much the hard part, so much so that the open source geometric kernels are decades behind the commercial ones. The computational geometry is genuinely a hard problem due to floating point errors and degenerate cases like parallel surfaces and tangent lines. Once you have the geometric kernels, CAM is little more than a physically aware pathfinding optimization problem. Computationally expensive but otherwise straight forward. The kernel, on the other hand, has to be built up experimentally, tracking down every place where the math breaks down or there’s a pathological case, until you’ve got the thousands of special cases worked out.
- ricardobayes 5mo agoAnyone finding this interesting will likely also like OpenSCAD - generate 3D CAD models from code. https://openscad.org/ https://openscad.org/
- ponyous 5mo agoI've seen this and other attempts like this[0] while exploring improvements for my CAD AI[1]. And I think these are potentially powerful solutions, but none of the current projects/weights have enough training (data or time) to make it work on arbitrary models. MeshCoder pretty much works only on models based of their training data. I haven't tried GenCAD but other commenters have confirmed my suspicion. [0]: https://daibingquan.github.io/MeshCoder/ https://daibingquan.github.io/MeshCoder/ [1]: https://grandpacad.com https://grandpacad.com
- soupspaces 5mo agoWait. Could this be used for videos keeping consistencies across frames? https://youtube.com/@thang010146 https://youtube.com/@thang010146
- nancyminusone 5mo agoIf you can get this to read dimensions and apply constraints, you've done it. But that doesn't look like the case. Every time I see one of these things,its like whoever worked on it doesn't know how to use CAD or understand what CAD is used for.
- rirze 5mo agoThis. Every 6 months, I reevaluate how well LLMs can model from scratch or can modify existing files. It's very superficial (atleast the last time I tried it). I'm guessing if/when LLMs crack visual reasoning, they might be able to do it.
- eMPee584 5mo agoWell visual reasoning is one approach, another is a coding-like approach like this cadquery-based solution https://articraft3d.github.io/ https://articraft3d.github.io/ which was also posted here a couple of days ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153064 Curious what you (and others) think, they also are collecting a pool of examples including prompt, reasoning log and token cost, quite interesting imho.
- iamgopal 5mo agoThere should be "login with gemini" or "login with claude" for saas world.
- atlasagentsuite 5mo ago[dead]