AngelCAD: Script-based 3D solid modeller | Hacker News Reader

AngelCAD: Script-based 3D solid modeller

arnholm.github.io

105 pointsapp4soft68 comments

I am the designer/developer of AngelCAD. It began from a desire of a fast Constructive Solid Geometry engine, based on a strongly typed scripting language. It is not a goal of the core AngelCAD package to develop a traditional CAD GUI, the emphasis is on scripting.

The boolean engine used is xcsg https://github.com/arnholm/xcsg based on Carve https://github.com/arnholm/carve

Why is the syntax so heavy and C-esque?

Documentation sections such as Datatypes in AngelScript, C++ Object handles to the application and Memory management are not features I want in a declarative language: accepted wisdom is to use the least powerful tool for the job. Edge cases should be dealt with as the exception, not burdensome as a rule which can be convention over configuration.

I would like to suggest something lighter. https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/ded2ba77b48f75f2813f15...

This would be simpler, less keystrokes, shorter and more legible.

It is specifically not a 'declarative' language, it is a general purpose language. OpenSCAD uses a declarative language, AngelCAD does not. If you want a declarative language, use OpenSCAD or implement your favorite language on top of the AngelCAD boolean engine (xcsg).

It is specifically not a 'declarative' language, it is a general purpose language.

OK, but why?

Edit: Why not is because of the mentioned norm, ie. use the least powerful tool for the job. Alternatively stated, KISS. Asking programmers to delve in to a new set of assumptions, limitations and so on that could otherwise be avoided is creating friction. Unless there is an explicit reason for doing so, it does not seem wise.

Further edit: You make a good point about thought process, and I think graphviz is a clear example of a popular tool where the friction you mention between application-specific concerns and restrictive declarative syntax often lies, sometimes complicating an overall workflow.

If you observe users of a declarative language things sometimes get very complicated because of the language limitations that do not match the thought process of the user.

AngelCAD does not try to impose a specific programming paradigm, it offers well known syntaxes and techniques for problems that can be complex. Of course, a user can choose to use only a subset of the language, this would be a typical starting point. Then with more experience and if the need arises, one can employ OO techniques with user defined scripting classes etc.

The user defines what is simple enough.

Edit1, reply to below comment. What is explained in AngelScript documentation is that the user does NOT have to worry about memory management. It is automatic.

Why should it be a 'declarative' language? There is no inherent benefit in that IMHO. I want the full set of capabilities that a general purpose language can offer, and still be scriptable. What is easier or more legible is very subjective. Your example does not seem easier to me.

Another thing is that I chose to use an existing language instead of creating a new one. I chose AngelScript because it was very easy to integrate with the implementation language (C++) and because it existed, was well documented and had all the features I wanted.

You could argue that one could choose another existing language (Python or whatever), and that is fair enough. The design is such that the language interpreter is entirely separate from the boolean engine (they are different executables), so all you have to do is implement the AngelCAD features in the scripting language you prefer and give it to the world. That is essentially what I did.

Your example does not seem easier to me.

The point, ex comments, is that it removes all the crap about scenes and setup and output and memory and types. Nobody cares, human time has value, machine time is free, and it's 2020.

Also, it's more expressive (more meaning in less space), which is a great feature.

> Nobody cares, human time has value, machine time is free, and it's 2020.

I disagree about types, it's great to actually know what you're dealing with and instantly know what operations you can do on objects without deep diving into layers of code and outdated documentation (the "ruby way"). Also I don't know if you have actual experience with CAD design but machine time is definitely not free there.

A declarative syntax seems better in theory but in practice if forces clunky syntax as soon as you are dealing with slightly deep hierarchies. Imperative syntax is just simpler, you can manipulate objects directly, pass them around to functions, the "object" paradigm makes sense here.

I don't know if you have actual experience with CAD design but machine time is definitely not free there.

Heh, actually I run a robotics company. There are multiple people working for me full time doing CAD design. I would argue that delays due to tedious input in an industrial fabrication context are more expensive as you are not just using human time but also blocking on supply chain and 'machine time' scheduling, and ultimately potentially all business expenses. For this reason I do not understand your point.

Why not?

The world doesn't need yet another CAD exchange format.

You could have done scripting for STEP models.

AngelCAD is not a "another CAD Exchange format". It is a scripting tool that creates existing standard formats such as STL, OBJ, OFF, DXF, SVG and more. It also reads some of those exchange formats. There is no new exchange format.

STEP is an entirely different domain.

I guess the .xcsg format is part of xcsg rather than AngelCAD, and the xcsg README.md doesn't mention being able to write out .xcgs files. Most CAD systems allow you to make multiple changes to a design, I don't see that with this system.

STEP is not an entirely different domain.

This looks very similar to OpenSCAD. If it's being actively developed I'll have to take a look at it!

Though, I really wish people would do something like this built on Julia (or perhaps even Nim). There's nothing too magical IMHO in what I can see of AngelScript or OpenSCAD script that couldn't be done with macro transformations. Then you'd get a real language with better documentation, semantics, etc and could integrate with a larger echo system.

I'd love to have an ecosytem in Julia where you could build 3D models, then plug them into a FEM model feeding the results into a deep neural net.

I work in engineering using CAD everyday, and I have a toy project idea I am developing using LISA FEA software, FreeCAD's dll, Blender rendering, and C/Python(Hylang) code to make it all work. The idea is to input the maximum working envelope of your geometry, input a load and placement(s) and have the system evolve a workable and aesthetic design to meet the need. I had this idea a long time ago based on my study of neural networks and genetic programming from the 80s, but the tech wasn't there yet. Take a look at what Autodesk has been researching in generative design [1]. FreeCAD has a python API and so does Blender. There are lots of hooks to each with exporters/importers. I particularly liked this Blender/Hy fun demo [2].

[1] https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/generative-design [2] https://mccormick.cx/news/entries/live-coding-blender-with-h...

I did a course on topological optimization at university which covered pretty much this concept. We used some software from a company called Altair. Essentially you defined some physical constraints and it generated the optimal 3D bracket.

The software was seriously clunky, but it has a lot of potential. https://www.altair.com/topology-optimization/

I would love Blender to have an editing pane for text-based CSG definitions.

Text-based CSG definitions are faster, clearer and easier than all these GUI tools. They are also diffable, scriptable and regexable.

This is very true and some of the reasons why I designed AngelCAD the way it is. As you say they are diffable and well suited for tracking in source control systems like git for example.

Nothing wrong with GUI CAD tools, but there are many of them already and some of them are huge and difficult to learn IMHO. Those who want a traditional GUI CAD tool should probably try something different, but AngelCAD is really not that hard to learn.

I wanted scripting with a strongly typed object oriented language, and I could not find one. So I created AngelCAD.

Hrrm, seems you can already do this via povray. http://www.povray.org/

I haven't used pov-ray in about 5 years, though I used to use it heavily, and at least back then, it didn't allow the export of the objects you render in a 3d format. It's a ray tracer designed to create scenes via objects modified via CSG.

I'm actually pleased to hear about this, since I find my patience with most 3d programs is very short, and I really have a need currently for being able to create 3d objects using CSG that I can work with hopefully for a game I'm making.

http://wiki.povray.org/content/HowTo:Use_POV-Ray_with_Blende...

I think the GUI would be the hard part there. The paid / professional tools have a lot of functions that improve the process of constructing models and viewing them. A clean backend would be nice, but the user experience is what would need to be solved.

Good point. The professor who taught my course on FEM said most of the commercial tools had FEM models not much more complex than the ones you'd make in a graduate FEM course. The real money was the GUI (and market share).

One thing I've been waiting in Julia is a nice GUI toolset, but they all seem to be broken or incomplete. Julia's static compile ability is also lacking currently. My take is that there's an opening in the market for a good CAD program based on an open source modeling engine. Sell the GUI for money (or an enterprise polished version), but make the core engine and modeling open source and with a good API. It'd be a small market slice (e.g. grad students, small startups), but perhaps it could gain mindshare over time.

Isn't the market for CAD software pretty much saturated? Most users learn one of the few established CAD programs during college or on the job and never learn anything else.

There is still an opportunity for a good opensource CAD program but only because the existing ones such as FreeCAD need an overhaul. Forking FreeCAD and fixing the glaring flaws would be significantly less work. The FreeCAD project is stagnating. There is an issue about someone wanting a visualization of the internal coordination system of a datum plane. That visualization already exists in other parts of FreeCAD but when you go through the forum posts you see that one of the users is blocking this absolutely microscopic change because of mathematical purity. Mathematically speaking planes don't have an orientation and therefore this feature would not make logical sense and you should use a local coordinate system if you want to change the orientation, including visualization. Except FreeCAD implements a datum plane with an internal local coordinate system. This results to weird things like sketches being rotated by 90°. There is no way to know in which direction your sketch has been rotated without the requested visualization so even if you wanted you can't just reattach your sketch in the correct orientation. You first have to mark the "up" direction by drawing an arrow in the sketch and then orienting the sketch with the help of that arrow. There is no need to talk about mathematical purity when the software has already broken it and makes the user suffer as a result.

Solidworks and Autocad have horrible backends. They are slow as sin and single threaded. Neither company is paying technical staff to improve the product.

I use openSCAD for 3D printing, but its limitations become quickly obvious. All surfaces are a series of 4 sided polygons. I would prefer to be able to define smooth curves and only choose the resolution on export. The language itself is a trip to wrap your head around. I regularly need to keep 4 levels of transformation in my head when working on an individual piece. There are better ways. I will need to look at AngelCAD.

Don't forget about BRL-CAD. Fully open source, decades old, actively maintained, scriptable, with a mature Tk GUI.

> The professor who taught my course on FEM said most of the commercial tools had FEM models not much more complex than the ones you'd make in a graduate FEM course.

I haven't worked in this space for 15 years so this might have changed, but back then no one used CAD tools for serious FEM modeling. The fundamental reason is that the requirements for a good FEM mesh are different from a good geometry mesh. Just one example from my work back then is that we had to follow modeling guidelines which required the use of quads with balanced aspect ratio only. Use of triangles had to be justified. We basically remodeled everything in the FEM software (PATRAN, FEMAP and lots of in-house tools in our case).

Yeah, I did work on exactly that,porting a 2 metro ton hydrogen fuel cell CAD model to Ansys. It was a nightmare. You first have to simplify everything by hand (aka remove all the small details) and then rework the topology when importing in the FEM tool (modelling supports, junctions etc).

This is actually a very active area of research (at least 5 years ago when I worked in simulation). There were papers on voxel methods, Fourier analysis (move the model to the frequency domain and filter out small details that are hard to mesh and affect convergence) to automatically réparé CAD models to an FEM environment :) I have no idea how things have advances since, but it looked nowhere near usable in the industry half a decade ago.

Actually, maybe a statistical algorithms would be suited to simplify models should one have a proper dataset to train on, because it's very hard to do analytically.

You could take a STEP schema and generate Julia composite types from that.

Oh that sounds very fascinating! Could you elaborate on that? I know little of the STEP format internals.

STEP is in two parts. There is the exchange format itself and the definitions of the models that are behind any exchange file.

The modelling is currently done in a language called EXPRESS but this is changing to use SysML tools and then transforming a SysML model to an XML schema using XSLT.

Maybe have a look at some of the Open Source CAD systems with full STEP capabilities like BRL-CAD [1] or Open Cascade Technology [2]. They contain C++ class definitions for each of the classes in supported STEP models as well as code to read and write exchange files, basically serializing and deserializing object instances.

The STEP C++ classes in a system like the two mentioned are typically machine generated from the standardized model, the tool that is used in BRL-CAD to do this is stepcode [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL-CAD [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology [3] https://github.com/stepcode/stepcode

The whole point of tools like OpenSCAD is that you can create complex 3D models without needing to use a GUI. I think this approach is most likely to appeal to people whose background is in programming where we often find that text based interfaces are a more efficient way of getting things done than working with a complicated GUI.

A lot of engineers don't want to work with code though, and if you know what you are doing with your GUI as a poweruser, you can be fairly efficient that way too.

The way I see it, if one of those tools really wants to succeed in the industry, it needs to have a GUI for that group of end-users. I think one way this could be nicely achievable with a JSX(-like) markup system, where components can be easily GUI editable as long as you don't have any custom code in them (just like low-code React editors do it).

Not only more efficient but easily repeatable and tweakable too ;)

I haven't used OpenSCAD yet but to me the workflow appears to be verry different from what e.g. FreeCAD is doing.

There is some overlap but it's not that big. OpenSCAD is useful if you can describe your model as an algorithm. FreeCAD is useful when you want to define your model visually.

I don't think one can say either of them is strictly better than the other because they are not quite the same.

However it's easy to see how avoiding the need for a constraint solver significantly reduces the complexity of the software.

OpenSCAD appealed to me as a programmer. I needed to prototype some parts and openscad was simpler than any of the GUI tools. Not sure how but I have talent making SolidWorks blow up with non-invertible matrices. :/

But OpenSCAD’s approach hit a wall quickly for me. Trying to figure out the distances for new objects was a PITA. It would be nice to have a simple GUI tool for placing an item by inserting the proper code. Ideally you’d be able to link changeable parameters in the GUI to code variables and be able to do things like show/hide in the GUI, or even a repl.

I don't have much experience with it myself but based on what you said it sounds like there's a real need to have the geometry definition language embedded within a full programming language, like the parent comment said.

In the meantime another possibility might be to write a code generator for the scad language.

Looking through some of the AngelScript samples, they look reasonable. eg:

https://github.com/arnholm/angelcad-samples/blob/master/rect...

https://github.com/arnholm/angelcad-samples/blob/master/poly...

That being said, those are clearly "toy" level of complexity and I haven't tried it out.

CAD is a funny area - very different. I'm still learning. It seems OpenSCAD excels when you can describe your object quickly. FreeCAD is for that as well (it has Python embedded) and when you can't describe it parametrically.

That said, a recent post on Reddit in r/openscad mentioned designing an entire car to do the Pike Peak challenge in Colorado.

We have a lot of tools and methodologies available. Picking the right one needs care and attention to detail. It's the same as the other "real world": I know my way around metal and wood working equipment and I can do simple welding. My carpentry is good first and second fix grade but not cabinetry, and I can weld stuff together, sometimes without melting both objects.

I can design bridges and roads as well and they may work fine ...

Yes, good 3D GUIs for design are very, very hard. Blender has been struggling with theirs for two decades now. Autodesk Inventor is pretty good, and that took over a decade of refinement.

Trying to design 3D objects by writing code is using the wrong tool for the job. You can make cool curvy things. Now try to design an auto suspension. Or a head.

P.S. unfortunately this doesn't appear to support STEP files either. Maybe they'll be able to add it someday.

Looking at their overview, this is Constructive Solid Geometry rather than B-rep (Boundary Representation) solid geometry. STEP does hypothetically support CSG, but B-rep STEP files are vastly more common in my experience.

This bit me when I was building a custom keyboard. I really love OpenSCAD but these mesh-based tools can produce files usable by CNC machines.

I eventually found CadQuery (https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery) which can create non-mesh STEP files. It’s a lot rougher then OpenSCAD but usable.

I'm not sure how useful this is to you but there is an OpenSCAD workbench for FreeCAD. [0] In theory you should be able to export STEP files via FreeCAD.

[0] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/OpenSCAD_Module

While technically that works the resulting STEP files aren’t anymore useful than an STL. You can’t send them to a CNC machine.

Can't one use the Path Workbench in FreeCAD once an OpenSCAD file is imported?

For STLs there are a number of 3D CAM tools: MeshCAM, pyCAM, FreeMill, or importing the file into Autodesk Fusion 360 and using its CAM tools.

List of other options at: https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/CAM#3D_2 and https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Commercial_Software#3D_C...

Extensions for FEM modelling is something I would like to see with AngelCAD. That would be cool.

I don't know Julia but you can build a front end to the AngelCAD boolean engine and by-pass AngelScript if you so prefer. Flexibility is a key idea.

I've tried OpenSCAD, and it's nice for what it is. I'll see if this offers more powerful scripting.

I used to program AutoLISP routines in AutoCAD decades ago. Creating geometry strictly from LISP without using the GUI was amazing.

One I tried that was striving to make the PL uniform across CAD packages is Rosetta [1]. It worked with Rhino and AutoCAD, and you could get it to work with others.

[1] http://web.ist.utl.pt/antonio.menezes.leitao/Rosetta/tutoria...

Take a look on VisualScriptCAD too.[0]

[0] https://github.com/kovacsv/VisualScriptCAD

What are advantages of this compared to openSCAD or CadQuery? Specifically I ditched openSCAD for cadquery because it can't export to brep formats like STEP.

I'm not sure it's an advantage, but it's nice to see an alternative implementation of CSG. OpenSCAD depends on CGAL. CadQuery depends on CASCADE. This depends on neither as far as I can tell.

exporting true brep is not an advantage? All CNC shops I talk to require a brep based file. Software that allows you create technical drawings also require that file format.

I think the answer is to your question, not the sentence after your question.

What IDE are you using for CadQuery? I really want to get into it, but I had trouble getting the default IDE up & running. And standalone python was too troublesome to code/visualize, the feedback loop got too long, especially compared to pure UI CAD such as Fusion360

I use cq-editor[1]. For sure CadQuery and CQ-editor have a insanely sucky install experience. I never got it to work by following conda guides. I run NixOS so for me it's as installing it as a package.

[1] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor

It got a very crazy build system, and uses it for all its dependencies. It uses some kind of special IDE with compilation rules for msvc and gcc, no configure/make, no cmake.

In this stage it has no chance of being packaged. I started converting it to autotools, but it's long way to go.

Since the project hasn't been discussed on HN before, we changed the URL from https://github.com/arnholm/angelcad/releases/tag/v1.4-00 to what appears to be its home page.

Looks very similar to OpenSCAD to me, only with a slightly more procedural language.

Looks like OpenSCAD. Any known relation there?

Curious as to why they'd base this on AngelScript (which I had not heard of before today) instead of a more widespread language like Python?

Because I wanted a strongly typed language that among many good things provides the opportunity for better error messages. Also, the AngelScript compiler is 100% embedded in the application and does not rely on an external environment like Python does. This makes it very easy to install and use AngelCAD.

I know Python is popular, and there is nothing to stop you from developing an alternative front end in Python or any other language of your liking, and still use the AngelCAD boolean engine, just implement the xcsg protocol https://github.com/arnholm/xcsg/wiki

You can already script OpenSCAD with Python using SolidPython https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython.

A better question would be, why yet another C knockoff on top of XML bloat? It just seems so uninspired. 3D drawing ought to be a slam-dunk for a dedicated DSL: pure functional composition (objects described in terms of relationships with each other), homoiconic (so code can generate code directly; no need for XML middleware makework).

Plus pure FP code should time-independent in its evaluation, so it doesn’t take a genius to imagine the benefits of (safely!) introducing a time axis on top of that. Procedural generation, animation; great potential there.

This is not all idle speculation, BTW: I wrote a semi-declarative DSL for 2D artwork production that blew its traditional imperative rivals out of the water while also being easy enough for non-programmers to use. So I know there’s potential there, and I’d be fascinated to see what kind of language someone with a mind for 3D math could shape for the task. Plus as a trained sculptor turned automation junkie who can’t stand GUI-based 3D drawing apps (they just don’t fit my head), I’d love to try something with a language-based interface instead.