Comment by eurekin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eurekin | Hacker News Reader

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I have come across a significant number of non engineers wanting to do, what ultimately involves some basic CAD modelling. Some can stall on such tasks for years (home renovation) or just don't do it at all. After some brief research, the main cause is not wanting to sink over 30 hours into learning basics of a cad package of choice.

For some reason they imagine it as a daunting, complicated, impenetrable task with many pitfalls, which aren't surmountable. Be it interface, general idea how it operates, fear of unknown details (tolerances, clearances).

It's easy to underestimate the knowledge required to use a cad productively.

One such anecdata near me are highschools that buy 3d printers and think pupils will naturally want to print models. After initial days of fascination they stopped being used at all. I've heard from a person close to the education that it's a country wide phenomena.

Back to the point though - maybe there's a group of users that want to create, but just can't do CAD at all and such text description seem perfect for them.

There's a mindset change needed to use a feature tree based constructive solid geometry system. The order in which you do things is implicit in the feature tree. Once you get this, it's not too hard. But figuring out where to start can be tough.

I miss the TechShop days, from when the CEO of Autodesk liked the maker movement and supplied TechShop with full Autodesk Inventor. I learned to use it and liked it. You can still get Fusion 360, but it's not as good.

The problem with free CAD systems is that they suffer from the classic open source disease - a terrible user interface. Often this is patched by making the interface scriptable or programmable or themeable, which doesn't help. 3D UI is really, really hard. You need to be able to do things such as change the viewpoint and zoom without losing the current selection set, using nothing but a mouse.

(Inventor is overkill for most people. You get warnings such as "The two gears do not have a relatively prime number of teeth, which may cause uneven wear.")

>> I have come across a significant number of non engineers wanting to do, what ultimately involves some basic CAD modelling.

I very much want Solvespace to be the tool for those people. It's very easy to learn and do the basics. But some of the bugs still need to get fixed (failures tend to be big problems for new users because without experience its hard to explain what's going wrong or a workaround) and we need a darn chamfer and fillet tool.

> I very much want Solvespace to be the tool for those people.

Probably not. "Copyright 2008-2022 SolveSpace contributors. Most recent update June 2 2022."

Most recent commit to the repository: Last week. It's slow and has slowed the last couple years but it's still going.

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