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WillAdams 1 hours ago [-]
As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool (the only things I've been successful w/ are programmatic, so OpenSCAD and its ilk), this is _very_ interesting to me.
(given that I shelled out for the _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ 'cause it had Version 1.1 prominently on the cover but the instructions have one download "v1.0 or later" and all the screen grabs are for 1.0 and the wiki is replete with pages tagged "This page needs to be updated for 1.1" or words to that effect).
I've been working on documenting a 2D program (for my employer and as part of a side project): https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
fsloth 56 minutes ago [-]
Much appreciate the feedback!
> As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool
I hear you, there are reasons for depth and complexity but not every program needs to be like that.
>if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
I notice you are discussing specifically CAD/CAM for CNC routers. I don't know if this is applicable for your use case or not. Would be very interested to hear your opinion!
The output is a tessellated 3MF mesh. The tessellation accuracy can be tweaked to be as precise as needed, so if that's the only constraint this may be applicable.
Thank's for raising the manual! I'll have to invest more time into it :)
WillAdams 44 minutes ago [-]
The commercial program MeshCAM has long been the poster child for using an STL for 3D CAM, and it can work well, though is vulnerable to faceting as discussed at:
See my response elsethread for what I am hopeful of --- if it's a good fit, maybe I can take the manual off your hands?
sirjaz 47 minutes ago [-]
Great job, these are the apps we need to see. Native Windows apps.
fsloth 16 minutes ago [-]
Thanks!
I will definitely keep plugging at this :)
(Nothing against Mac as such, let's see if I will have bandwidth for a port at some point).
evanbabaallos 3 days ago [-]
This is seriously impressive. You can tell how much thought and intention went into the philosophy behind it
fsloth 3 days ago [-]
Thank you so much!
IshKebab 3 hours ago [-]
This could be neat for schools and absolute beginners I guess. But I think the "basic shapes + booleans" workflow is going to be much more annoying than "sketch + extrude" that you see in almost every other parametric CAD program.
fsloth 3 hours ago [-]
Agree!
Sketching 2D shapes is a very natural way to start thinking about shapes.
That's why there is a sketch + extrude.
Here are few examples - 42 seconds to a desk organizer
To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.
OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.
Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).
WillAdams 51 minutes ago [-]
More than anything, what I _really_ want is an interactive tool which allows me to work in both 2 and 3 dimensions, tagging points/coordinates with names and then referring to them by name while applying distances/lengths and modifications such as arcs and curves.
I've been using Open(Python)SCAD: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview but have wished for an interactive tool which would allow programmatic usage as well (apparently OnShape does this by having FeatureScript as the basis and the UI simply edits the script?).
fsloth 19 minutes ago [-]
This is really good feedback.
The data model supports solving dependencies like this on the data level.
TBH I don't know at the moment how to make something like this accessible but will definitely keep it in mind.
I am esp. grateful for:
https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/d...
(given that I shelled out for the _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ 'cause it had Version 1.1 prominently on the cover but the instructions have one download "v1.0 or later" and all the screen grabs are for 1.0 and the wiki is replete with pages tagged "This page needs to be updated for 1.1" or words to that effect).
I've been working on documenting a 2D program (for my employer and as part of a side project): https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
> As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool
I hear you, there are reasons for depth and complexity but not every program needs to be like that.
>if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
I notice you are discussing specifically CAD/CAM for CNC routers. I don't know if this is applicable for your use case or not. Would be very interested to hear your opinion!
The output is a tessellated 3MF mesh. The tessellation accuracy can be tweaked to be as precise as needed, so if that's the only constraint this may be applicable.
Thank's for raising the manual! I'll have to invest more time into it :)
https://www.cnczone.com/forums/benchtop-machines/132144-face...
see the image at:
https://www.cnccookbook.com/cnc-software/
https://www.cnccookbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/facet...
See my response elsethread for what I am hopeful of --- if it's a good fit, maybe I can take the manual off your hands?
I will definitely keep plugging at this :)
(Nothing against Mac as such, let's see if I will have bandwidth for a port at some point).
Sketching 2D shapes is a very natural way to start thinking about shapes.
That's why there is a sketch + extrude.
Here are few examples - 42 seconds to a desk organizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX6g5slTdeE
Or quick wavy vase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkhAUhlg81s
The booleans and extrusion shapes are complements - both fitting different type of modeling.
Booleans are not only about shaping but also about composing individual parts to more complex assemblies.
So one can extrude few parts, then eg. combine them with a join.
What CAD kernel are you using? OpenCASCADE?
The CAD kernel is written by me apart from the boolean solver for the meshes which is the superb https://github.com/elalish/manifold
To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.
OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.
Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).
I've been using Open(Python)SCAD: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview but have wished for an interactive tool which would allow programmatic usage as well (apparently OnShape does this by having FeatureScript as the basis and the UI simply edits the script?).
The data model supports solving dependencies like this on the data level.
TBH I don't know at the moment how to make something like this accessible but will definitely keep it in mind.