| ▲ | MrDOS 4 hours ago |
| SolveSpace is a wonderfully different take on parametric CAD, but development has really slowed, and it seems fundamentally incapable of some pretty rudimentary features (like chamfers[0]). Dune 3D[1] seems like a pretty effective spiritual successor. 0: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/149 1: https://dune3d.org/ |
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| ▲ | phkahler 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Chamfers and Fillets are my next major undertaking. Don't expect them any time soon, but they've moved to the top of my list. They are extremely difficult to do in the general case - so we will not cover all cases. Several years ago I tried an experiment: 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 ;-) |
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| ▲ | MrDOS 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh, sorry, I didn't recognize that this had been posted by a SolveSpace maintainer! Rad. I am glad to hear the project is still moving. I also appreciate the difficulty of generalizing chamfers/fillets. There's a reason that basically all FOSS CAD packages have struggled with it. | | |
| ▲ | echelon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > difficulty of generalizing chamfers/fillets. There's a reason that basically all FOSS CAD packages have struggled with it. Could you decompile CAD, run it through an LLM, and call it a day? |
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| ▲ | julbaxter 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Dune3D uses SolveSpace behind the scene. |
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| ▲ | phkahler 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Only for the constraint solver. Dune uses OCCT for the solid model. | | |
| ▲ | amelius 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm curious why you didn't go with OCCT for Solvespace. | | |
| ▲ | phkahler an hour ago | parent [-] | | >> I'm curious why you didn't go with OCCT for Solvespace. I didn't start Solvespace, but Jonathan was apparently in a DIY mode after developing his take on constraint-based sketching. It's also very easy to go from NURBS curves to NURBS surfaces, the challenge begins at boolean operations which continue to be a source of bugs for us. This is really the only option other than OCCT and the code is small and approachable so I try to make it better. | | |
| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent [-] | | Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT (or make it optional)? It would make certain things such as fillets/chamfers much easier, I suppose, and it would make those boolean operation bugs go away. And exporting to various formats would be easy. | | |
| ▲ | phkahler an hour ago | parent [-] | | >> Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT It would, and it has been considered. The sketch elements in solvespace are significantly decoupled from the solid model. That means we could substitute (via wrapper maybe) an OCCT object instead of our SShell class. Then you'd have to change a set of solvespace curves to OCCT curves to make extrusions from them and such. But that would be most of the work. We do tag all triangles in the mesh with a sketch entity handle for flat surfaces so you can constrain points to a face. I'm not sure how that would be handled. We will also be tagging edges of the solid with sketch entity handles in the future so we can do chamfers and fillets - say by selecting a line entity and applying a modifier to it which gets applied to the NURBS shell. I'm not sure how that would go with OCCT. But yes I've given a bit of thought to it ;-) |
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| ▲ | IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that. |
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| ▲ | jonpurdy 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets. Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid). | |
| ▲ | jabl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Some years ago I tried to learn CAD by doing some FreeCAD tutorials, and failed. But I hear 1.0 was a big step forward, and the recently released 1.1 is also a big step, and it should be somewhat decent nowadays. Maybe I need to try again one day. | |
| ▲ | l-albertovich 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I just tested it out of curiosity and found that viewport manipulation behaves in a very similar way to onshape which feels very natural to me. I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea. | | |
| ▲ | Karliss 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There are more than dozen different viewport navigation manipulation modes, latest version added two more (Solidworks and Siemens NX). You can pick whichever behaves closest to the program you are most used to. |
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| ▲ | brcmthrowaway an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How does Dune3D compare to FreeCAD? |
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| ▲ | faangguyindia 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| All we need is a genius, with unlimited claude and codex credit and he will replace Fusion 360 atleast in 3d printing and machining space It's so sad most guys aren't comming together to build some great CAD engine which open source really needs! Gimp is shame, photoshop is increasingly being lockdown and people who have smarts to fix that are doing nothing. |
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| ▲ | ezst 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That people on this forum convinced themselves that it's a reasonable take to vibe code a useful geometric kernel is profoundly depressing. | | |
| ▲ | faangguyindia an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Just wait for sometime, there will be one. There are many geniuses on HN for tacking up challenge | | | |
| ▲ | stackedinserter an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Correct me if I'm wrong, kernel is already there, and it's decent enough. What's lacking is a good user interface to it. |
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