[HN Gopher] BRL-CAD
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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 :-)
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