Show HN: Cadseer. a parametric solid modeling CAD desktop application

Show HN: Cadseer. a parametric solid modeling CAD desktop application(gitlab.com)

102 points by blobfish01 3 years ago | 32 comments

Cadseer is in the same genre as: solidworks, inventor, freecad etc... Cadseer is alpha software, so lots of missing features, bugs, crashes, file incompatibilities etc...

About me: I spent 15 years designing stamping dies on a high end cad system. During that time, I also developed and marketed extensions/plugins toward that cad system. Through that experience, I came disillusioned with 'vendor lock-in' and proprietary software in general. I basically retired, took the vow of poverty and moved all my computing to open source. I have since, and continue to, try and improve the open source cad environment.

mitthrowaway2 3 years ago |

Very cool! I always like to see more activity in the open-source CAD space.

It must take a lot of motivation to create your own CAD. Were you dissatisfied with other open-source offerings, or do you have a different philosophy you're shooting for, or did you want to try it yourself for the satisfaction?

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

I think most will agree open source cad is lacking. At least in the 3d solid modeling world. Philosophy? Tough question! I guess, "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler".

mitthrowaway2 3 years ago | | |

I see why you wouldn't be satisfied with FreeCAD then!

akiselev 3 years ago |

I haven't tried it out yet but screenshots are available here: https://gitlab.com/blobfish/cadseer/-/wikis/screenshots

Looks pretty advanced already! It would be great to have more screenshots of the sketch mode though

Did you write your own geometric modeling kernel or are you using an existing one?

Edit: The git history goes back at least seven years! That's a lot of dedication

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

I made a screen cast a few days ago. https://vimeo.com/813202571 If you watch that you can see the sketch mode. Sketcher need a lot of love. No I didn't write a geometric kernel and I am using opencascade. I think my first git commit is about 10 years ago, but I didn't get serious until about 6 years ago.

gen_greyface 3 years ago | | |

i'm now gonna binge watch CAD screencast videos. very interesting.

aetherspawn 3 years ago |

I watched your video and I just wanted to say that it looks really good. It could very easily be used instead of i.e. SolidWorks to make basic parts. I am very impressed that you were able to do this mostly on your own.

Maybe you could get some momentum with it in the 3D printing community if you made a nice website for it and did a YouTube series i.e. "How to design and print a phone holder" or things like that.

Does it have assembly mode? I imagine implementing Assembly constraints would be very difficult.

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

No it doesn't have any assembly at this point. I have used the solvespace engine for the sketcher, so I think I can use it for assembly also ... someday.

vonnieda 3 years ago |

Wow, I've been looking for something like this for years! Thanks for posting. I fired it up on an M1 Mac (Rosetta 2) and it runs quite nicely. Watching through the screencast now, and looking forward to using this.

I've had an interest in writing an open source 3D CAD for some time, but I would far rather help with an existing project. Are you interested in PRs, and are there specific things you'd like help with?

One thing right away, I'd be happy to help with Mac M1 builds if that would be helpful. I maintain several open source projects and provide binaries for many platforms.

Great work!

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

Thank you. I definitely could use help on the other platforms(mac, windows). I spent a huge amount of time deploying on those, which makes it great to hear it is running for you.

Sure any PRs for bugs are great. If you want to take on something ambitious, I would like to talk about it first so we waste as little developer time as possible.

solarkraft 3 years ago |

Wow, it looks pretty advanced! How does it generally compare to other (free) software in terms of features? What are the advantages over other systems, what are its disadvantages?

Have you been working on this thing by yourself? Have you ever shared it before? This looks like it has gotten very little attention so far, especially in relation to how good it seems.

What was your main motivation for building a new program rather than improving an existing one like FreeCAD?

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

I am using opencascade and doing solid modeling vs mesh modeling. So cadseer is closer to something like freecad vs blender.

A list of advantages and disadvantages should be done by somebody without bias. I will give you an example: I have incorporated 'git' revision control. With every update, files are wrote to disk and a git commit is made. With this git setup, I decided to exclude the typical 'undo' command and have no temporary files. I consider this an advantage because you get revision control and very little, if at all, loss of work when a crash occurs and the code base is cleaner and eliminates a fruitful source of bugs. Others might consider this a disadvantage because there is no traditional undo command.

Yes this is my pet project and haven't done any type of promotion until now.

I actually worked on freecad for a while. People familiar with freecad will recognize some of the things I made for freecad that I used in cadseer. I think freecad is great, but I wanted the freedom to do my own things, for better or worse.

solarkraft 3 years ago | | |

Thank you!

The git integration sounds brilliant and reminds me of Fusion 360's timeline functionality with which you can go back to an edit you made, change something about it and have the change propagated through all later edits: Sounds a lot like rebasing!

Now that you're promoting it and still calling it "alpha software": Are you putting effort into polishing it up? Doesn't make mucb sense for people to invest in it if it's going to remain in alpha state, after all (though it seems like you're using it successfully, so maybe it's not that bad?).

carterschonwald 3 years ago |

Very cool! What internal rep are you using? B rep or sdf or other? It does seem like the choice of data structure has a huge impact on what’s easy vs not.

I’ll try it out!

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

cadseer uses opencascade, so BRep. Any feedback is welcome.

rcarmo 3 years ago |

Very impressive. I’ve been struggling to get off OpenSCAD and into proper parametric modeling (am using Blender with CAD Sketcher since I just can’t abide FreeCAD), and after taking a look at the screencast you linked to, I will be giving this a go on both Mac and Fedora.

Do you/will you support STEP files?

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

Any feedback is welcome. You can import and export step files. There is no support of assemblies, so I am not sure what you will get.

rcarmo 3 years ago | | |

That’s fine. I do mostly 3D printing, so although I do have some interlocking models I don’t have awesomely complex geometry. But having STEP support ensures I can move my data about to some degree.

somat 3 years ago | |

openscad is parametric, it is very parametric. by some tokens it is more parametric than the "proper parametric modeler" it is however missing a constraint solver. that would be my dream cad software, a proper scene description language to model in and a built in robust constraint library so you don't have to program your constraints from scratch.

rafamvc 3 years ago |

What is the difference between this and openscad?

I want to love openscad but it is hard to encapsulate and distribute code, as the library system is non existent.

Why is this better for stamping dies? I don't know much about it, but often wondered why there aren't cads specifically made for every fabrication style.

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

I have never used openscad, but from what I understand there would be 2 major differences. The first is the geometry engine. Openscad uses a mesh modeler, where cadseer uses boundary representation(opencascade). The second is the user interface. Openscad uses code/script to drive the model generation where cadseer uses user interaction to build a model generating dependency graph.

Cadseer is not better for stamping dies. That is just my background. I think cad is getting more into specialized industries now that the foundational stuff is more concrete. I don't think most people appreciate what it takes to develop a solid modeling kernel.

inportb 3 years ago | |

This appears to implement nontrivial features such as constraint solving and the ability to easily fillet edges.

I like the idea of programming geometry, but never got the hang of the OpenSCAD language. I eventually settled on JSCAD.

guitarbill 3 years ago | | |

I've found CadQuery to be a nice replacement for OpenSCAD. The viewer isn't as good, but using CadQuery + Jupyter Notebook is real nice. And it does fillets/chamfers, plus you can reference geometry. Bit of a learning curve though

RobotToaster 3 years ago | | |

There's also implicitcad, that can use haskell, and does automatic fillets.

georgeoliver 3 years ago |

As someone who just started with FreeCAD last week (and have never used CAD tools previously) I'm wondering what its major pain points for you are?

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

If you are just starting with 3d modeling, you have a learning curve ahead of you regardless of the software. I am not sure at this point if I should be giving you advice.

RobotToaster 3 years ago |

This is definitely something the 3d printing community would be interested in. The lack of a good open source cad program has been an issue.

eternityforest 3 years ago |

Looks like a CSG type modeler, but visual instead of code based, and with some kind of really cool blend operation?

Pretty neat!

blobfish01 3 years ago | |

cadseer is using opencascade, so it is BRep instead of CSG.