Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program

https://console.substack.com/p/console-116

by mmmmkay • 4 years ago

12 9 4 years ago

console.substack.com

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

FreeCAD isn't even mentioned, but it implements precisely that "work on geometry step by step" workflow.

claimred• 4 years ago

It is mentioned on author's website though. https://www.fornjot.app/blog/the-world-needs-another-cad-pro...

There is lots of interesting space between "hobbyist" and "can justify to spend loads of money", and I tend to find myself right in the middle of that.

Feels like an indie cad era is upon us. Plasticity, mart3d, antimony ..

A CAD application, especially one with a custom CAD kernel, is a huge project.

What I've always found amusing is that there are actually quite a few geometric modeling kernels and every one of them costs a ton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel

hannobraun3• 4 years ago

FreeCAD is GUI-based though, not code-first like Fornjot. A better comparison would be CadQuery (https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html) or Cascade Studio (https://zalo.github.io/CascadeStudio/), both of which are code-first and based on the same CAD kernel as FreeCAD.

Avlin672• 4 years ago

please, code first cad is not the way to go ! Did you ever use a CAD software for a proper project ? The hard stuff is in the UX/UI… or just put a DSL over CGAL and dall ir a day.

I love Rust, I love code first approach, I like this project, but the average guy trying to put a threaded hole onto an extruded profile will hardly code it…

traverseda• 4 years ago

There are no good libraries to build open source CAD on top of really. CGAL doesn't support fillets or chamfers, and you'd really want a geometric constraint solver. I think building code first is a good first step.

hannobraun3• 4 years ago

Code-first CAD is the way to go for some users and some use cases. I personally won't make any stronger claim than that, nor will I accept any sweeping claims to the opposite.

The average guy can keep doing what they're doing. Fornjot will not take GUI-based CAD away from them.

Avlin672• 4 years ago

open source effort would be rather spent on UI/UX over CGAL or Libfive. The project is a dead end because they choose to reimplement inverse CSG instead of reusing years of R&D or any FRep library

sackerhews• 4 years ago

Only dead fish go with the flow.

hannobraun3• 4 years ago

Hey, creator of Fornjot here. I had experimented with f-rep for years before switching to b-rep for the current iteration of Fornjot. I came to the conclusion that f-rep, while neat, is too limited for what I intend to do. I came to a similar conclusion regarding the mesh-based approach of CGAL.

I've written more about that here: https://www.fornjot.app/blog/why-fornjot-is-using-boundary-r...

Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program

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