Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent but I wish I could find a tool for designing houses that was graphical but underneath based on a programming language.

There are several cad and floor planner software that are for designing houses, and modelling software like sketch up that are more general. All seem to be awkward or incomplete.

Sketch up is perhaps the fastest for visualizing the shell, but is painful to sketch something with exact measurements. You end up sketching on paper and then trying to enter it into the computer.

Sweet home 3D is clunky. Homestyler is actually really good, but doesn’t do roofs and lifts.

You can actually do great getting-a-feel sketches in The Sims (honest!) but the grid is all wrong.

And all of them treat walls and things as solid volumes. There’s no snap-to-grid on standard studwork spacings or picking walls based on cavity.

So much could be done in code eg sorting out wiring, plumbing etc.

Building models like openscad does hints at a direction where you lay out the general building and code can auto fit to actually make it buildable and produce working construction drawings etc. Even start computing structural aspects etc.

If anyone knows the killer software for designing houses easily but properly, please let me know! I may have missed something. ;)

Industry has such workflows but they currently revolve around heavy products like Tekla Structures, Grasshopper/Rhino, Revit, Archicad and so on.

I'm not aware of "light" version for "non-professional" residential projects.

The thing about buildability is that when you want an _actually_ buildable model you want vendor components(windows, curtain walls and whatnot), manufacturable details and so on and those come out of the box AFAIK only in a product like Tekla Structures.

Industry is reaching a stage where the house that is to be built on-site can be actually modeled in 3D - the current WOW is mostly that the 3D model is used to output 2d drawings and then manual building ensues as it has for centuries/decades with details that are not exactly right, lots of manual fittings and ad-hoc installations if HVAC and so on.

BIM 3D models are only now becoming detailed enough with enough cross domain support to actually model the whole thing.

Warning: self promotion ahead, but you've asked for it.

I built a company around this [0], but it's not open source, and I haven't exposed the dev platform to the public yet, and might only expose it to licensed partners.

It is a platform to create online 3d configurators for consumers and sales, driven by scripted templates that generate 3d components according to some configuration... Currently I'm leveraging webpack hot reloading, but an online IDE is on the roadmap for next year.

There are a lot of caveats in designing such a system, especially if you want to keep the performance top notch on mobile, and you want to have a modern dev experience.

The biggest value however is in the 3d components itself: simple components that compose well and allow you to build basically anything in a few days if you know what you need...

If I'd need to build it from scratch now (almost a decade later), I could probably build a cleaner, better performing platform in a couple of months in deep crunch mode.

However, if you have never done this before, it might take quite a few mistakes and a lot of refactoring before you get it right. (During the first 2 years I rebuilt the core 5 times because I had yet another use case that didn't fit in the models customers were asking for.)

If you are serious and have lots of houses to design, I might be able to help.

TBH the current website and the configurators on it are old and need some love, but if you want to see a good example of a client leveraging this tool, check this link [1], and click on 3d design.

Upfront: it's not cheap.

[0] https://virtualsaleslab.com

[1] https://brustor.com/en

Multi-domain, complex or wicked problems often have these challenges: in mechanical design, electronic design, software development, as well as traditional architecture. Parametric approaches typically break down when articulating the constraints becomes more tedious than simply solving them out of band if the number of times the problem will repeat is tolerable. Likewise, parametric approaches can excel when articulation is easy or where fitness functions are straightforward to define and generative solutions are feasible. Tool complexity creates training/hiring issues, and being tied to a tool challenges solution longevity. Use the right tool for the job.

As far as houses go, check out https://blenderbim.org/community.html - very capable developers.

TrussFab takes care of the structural aspect: https://hpi.de/baudisch/projects/trussfab.html

It’s not FOSS, and not parametric in the way you’re thinking, but versions of it work in wine: Chief architect. I use an OLD version I have of it, for visualizing renos mostly, but it has all the smarts to properly get you to something buildable to code with all the BOMs. You set your defaults for materials and measurements, which can be changed after the fact to give it a bit of a “parametric light” feel. I wish there was something as powerful and fully featured in the FOSS space.

> It’s not FOSS

GraphSCAD "probably" is FOSS and is GPL software, as it uses OpenSCAD API, which is covered by GPL License[0]; same way as all Blender add-ons should be under GPL[1] because they use Blender API, which is also GPL.

Also MCAD[2], OpenSCAD Parametric CAD Library, "should" be under GPL too, but its actually under LGPL (and I guess it volates GPL if only MCAD is based on OpenSCAD & not vice versa).

[0] https://github.com/openscad/openscad/blob/master/COPYING

[1] https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1135229215761195009

[2] https://github.com/openscad/MCAD

FreeCad is a generic parametric CAD software. It is not designed for houses, but it allows to create constraints-based designs and is scriptable through python.

So not a 100% match but it checks several of your items. If you are considering something as remote as openSCAD, I think you should give a try to FreeCAD and look at a few tutorials (its workflow is not the most intuitive thing)

See Arch[0] module for FreeCAD.

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

> it allows to create constraints-based designs

I've never seen an architect using a constraints-type CAD design workflow.

I always thought constraint-based design is typical mechanical engineering thinking.

Do architects work with constraints as well?

> I've never seen an architect using a constraints-type CAD design workflow.

Take a look on PARAM-O[0], the visual scripting solution for Archicad powered by VisualScriptEngine.[1]

Also, here is VisualScriptCAD[2], based on VisualScriptEngine.

[0] https://graphisoft.com/param-o

[1] https://github.com/kovacsv/VisualScriptEngine

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

You could make openscad modules for the various parts of your house sketch and use those. I’m not sure if that would work well or not.

OpenSCAD style thinking is CSG (constructive solid geometry).

It basically thinks of geometry in terms of volumes.

Architects think mostly in term of surfaces.

If you give them volumes, they're unlikely to know what to do with your design other than re-creating the model from scratch in their favorite tool from dimensionned 2D projections of the computed model.

It would also be great if you had some kind of declarative specification language which could generate (parts of) buildings.

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