I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea.
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/453#issuecom...
That could only do the top or bottom of a straight extrusion. This time will be a more general than that. Not looking forward to doing corners where 3 fillets meet ;-)
Is there an open-source "cleanroom" re-implementation of the Parasolid kernel? I just like the way Solidworks does things vs. Autodesk.
To pan around the space, use the right mouse button. To zoom, use the scroll wheel. To rotate, use Shift+Right mouse button.
Why not play with it a little bit before dismissing it so suddenly? I don't need to mention to a Solidworks/Autodesk user that CAD tools take some patience to understand properly :-)
Or middle mouse button / click the scroll wheel.
Edit: Forgot I also got doom running in openscad: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/openscad-doom/
and doom running in openscad in the browser at https://doom.mikeayles.com/
As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.
All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.
That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.
For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:
- Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based
- Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces
- Trimming surfaces
- Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)
- Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.
Minor nit: why does the rendered in-window text use a really awful pixelated font? It looks like what happens when a font gets rendered onto a pixel grid without any hinting or snapping.
masonhensley•1h ago
Neat that they got it working in the browser.
bhouston•1h ago
FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives.
I find the rendering side of things under developed though.
ur-whale•52m ago
FreeCAD has become much better, no denying it.
"Amazing" is however not the word I would use though, the UI is still very convoluted and very hard to learn.
The worst part in FreeCAD, and which remains true to this day is the load of minutia you need to know to handle/avoid weird corner cases that you inevitable run into when you start building complex models and where FreeCAD stubbornly refuses to let you carry on with your work.
When you paint yourself into one of these corners, the software is hugely unhelpful when it comes to understanding what you did wrong and how to correct it.
In short, the word "Amazing" only works if you compare it to the absolute abomination the UI was a few years back.
But compare FreeCAD today to, for example, how slick Fusion is, there is still a very, very wide gap.
Finally, the geometry engine, is a somewhat old and creaky thing that sometimes downright fails to compute fillets or surface/surface intersections correctly, so yeah, YMMV.
FreeCAD is however, free software, and not controlled by one of the worst corp. in the world of software: Autodesk. So huge thumbs up there.
jstanley•23m ago
trey-jones•2m ago
For free and open it's truly impressive though. Actually I think my time building iOS UIs in Storyboard was at least as useful as previous CAD experience, since constraints are the foundation of (at least one approach to) designing parts.
lopsotronic•50m ago
The fact anyone got a CAD kernel working in the browser is insane. Parsing the vagaries, vendor cruft, and gaping holes in STEP files has occupied a non-trivial amount of my career.
You want to talk about poisoned specs . . .
3yr-i-frew-up•6m ago
I did a major project with it in 2019 and it was great back then.
The issues it has are pretty minor. Admittedly I ended up using a fork for Assembly3(IIRC)