[HN Gopher] BRL-CAD ___________________________________________________________________ BRL-CAD Author : aparks517 Score : 25 points Date : 2022-08-13 12:40 UTC (3 days ago) (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org) (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org) | digdugdirk wrote: | As a Mechanical Engineer, I would absolutely love to see | something like this (or Freecad/OpenSCAD/etc) step up to the | "Blender level" to functionally compete against Solidworks. Its | expensive, its buggy, and it requires a beast of a computer to | function in any semi-respectable way. | | Does anyone have any experience in the software side of the | industry to help explain why nothing open source is able to step | up in a meaningful way? | gh02t wrote: | CSG and CAD are just really hard to get right from scratch | technically, with lots of math and edge cases and a massive | number of features and optimizations you need to implement to | hit minimum viability. Add to that the UI on top of the | underlying geometry engine is inherently complicated and is a | considerable software engineering problem in its own right. | Plus the big players have so much momentum and offer | free/nearly free (in terms of cost) options that are really | slick and powerful e.g. Fusion360 or OnShape. Blender and KiCAD | are examples of similar semi-niche professional tools that have | been successful against similar barriers, but I still am not | optimistic. Solvespace is cool though and that's the one I'm | praying for, personally. | PostOnce wrote: | Fusion360 keeps getting worse and worse, they revoke features | and jack the price every few months. At some point open | source becomes the better value, at least there you know | features won't be stolen or the price increased without | notice | buildbot wrote: | Yeah Fusion360 is incredibly slow on my M1Max, and does | terribly bugging things like spam launchdarkley 2 MILLION | TIMES if you dns block it... | gh02t wrote: | Yeah to be fair I never actually liked Fusion 360 | personally. I don't find it super intuitive, but it is | quite powerful and polished and I know some people who use | it professionally and can do magic in it. OnShape really is | perfect to my tastes in terms of being super intuitive yet | powerful, but the cloud aspect gives me heartburn. Part of | me hopes Autodesk locking down what used to be very | generous license terms on F360 might spawn more OSS work to | replace it. Similar crackdowns on Eagle were what motivated | a lot of the improvements to KiCAD in the last several | years that really took it over the line to being a tool I | think is legitimately competitive. | threatripper wrote: | The CAD geometry kernel is the problem. It needs to handle a | ton of different features and gets very complex very quickly. | FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE which is also used by quite a few | other programs. This kernel dates back to the 90s and is | supported by a company. | | See: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/OpenCASCADE | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology | samwillis wrote: | This completely, OpenCASCADE is just not a good enough | foundation to build something as powerful and stable as | SolidWorks on, and I'm not convinced it could become one. It | would take 10s millions dollars and many years to build a new | geometric kernel that would allow an open source CAD package | to compete at the same level as the "Pro" packages. That | would require a massively collaborative effort in the | engineering community lead by a company (or two) with deep | pockets and an agenda! | forgotpwd16 wrote: | Was gonna ask why not link the homepage instead but apparently | the wiki is linked as About page from the project's homepage. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | That's honestly not a bad idea in general. Wikipedia does a | better job describing most software than the landing page | typically does. That said, BRL-CAD seems to be an exception and | describes itself very well in large text above the fold! 10/10 | CmdrLoskene wrote: | I once worked as a developer for Pro/Engineer, and sometime after | that, I was on the user side using BRL-CAD. I can't speak to the | quality of the product these days, but at the time, BRL-CAD was | achingly slow and riddled with bugs. Using it for my day-to-day | work made me want to quit my job, and I left as soon as I had | something more promising lined up. I am sorry to sound like I'm | unfairly judging BRL-CAD. Perhaps we were using it for something | it was not intended to do, or not the way it was meant to be | used. I knew my way around the Pro/E interface and it was miles | ahead of BRL-CAD. But even CADDS-IV was better than BRL-CAD. I | can only speculate that being government-funded, the dev team for | BRL-CAD had to make brutal decisions regarding when the feature | set was "good enough," because they were working with a very | limited budget tied to specific program goals. I don't know. I do | know that using BRL-CAD was hellish back in the day. | threatripper wrote: | Did you have many different problems with BRL-CAD or was it | connected to specific features? | | While I can't speak for BRL-CAD my experience with FreeCad | which uses OpenCascade has been mixed. The chamfer/fillet tool | there is just broken. If you use that and change some dimension | it is likely to randomly crash. So, overall my experience has | been ranging from rock solid to total trash depending on which | features you use and what kind of models you create with it. | The key question is "what do the developers use it for?" which | should give you a hint for what kind of problem it is made. | SiempreViernes wrote: | This comment would increase tremendously in value if you said | something about which version of BRL-CAD you used. | CmdrLoskene wrote: | Unfortunately I have forgotten the version. This was in the | early 90s. | dkga wrote: | Silly me thought this was something interesting about the | Brazilian Real - Canadian Dollar exchange rate! | fcoury wrote: | Came here to say this :-) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-16 23:00 UTC)