Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)
solvespace.com
solvespace.com
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.
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 ;-)
We'd welcome contributions, and it's much easier to contribute to the smaller codebase. I think there's potential for coding agents to accelerate this work since robust point-in-shell and shell-is-watertight tests are mostly sufficient to judge correctness, allowing the agent to iterate; loosely you could define your geometric operation as a function of whether a point should lie within the output region, then ask the agent to convert that to b-rep. I wouldn't currently expect useful progress without deep human effort and understanding though.
I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea.
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
Actually I think they have a hobbyist subscription which isn't totally extortionate now if you want to stay legal. Maybe get it for a year.
There's also a soft-fork which some folks are funding:
If you haven't tried FreeCAD recently, it's gotten a lot better in the past couple of years. It seems to have hit escape velocity, so to speak, and is improving rapidly in a way it hadn't for a long time.
Major caveat! Also online access required.
And if you decide to upgrade, the next tier is 1,410€ per year.
For that amount of cash, FreeCAD can abuse and torture me quite a bit. Lol.
Also at the rate FreeCAD is developing and improving now, if more people would drop just 1k€/ donations into FreeCAD/OCCT, chances are your pains will ease rather sooner than later.
I highly recommend watching one of MangoJelly's beginner videos for FreeCAD, even if you have CAD experience. It made it very clear how to adapt my Fusion360 skills.
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 ;-)
I also appreciate the 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?
Never presume that a thing is legal (or will not later be punished) on the basis that someone is already doing it.
All software that isn't delivered over client/server to thin clients is now subject to being trivially cloned.
I am using SolveSpace for my 3D prints because I just don't have time to learn anything else. With SolveSpace I've been productive in like 2 hours after launching it the first time.
So far you've saved me like $500 in things I've printed instead of bought. Just last week I've printed nasal manifold for my DIY sleep monitoring setup. Replacement specs legs a month ago.
If you really make fillets and chamfers a reality, please don't forget to open donations.
>corners where 3 fillets meet
* Intersection. Conceptually the simplest, the chamfers would just be joined by the solid addition of all three fillet surfaces, creating three new sharp corner edges that meet at a single vertex.
* Rolling sphere. Imagine an idealized spherical "thumb" smoothing out caulk. The middle would be joined by a new spherical concave surface, tangent to all three fillets. Also generalizable to convex fillet intersections, smoothing out sharp corners.
* NURBS, with adjustable parameters or even control points, eg when you want a little more "meat" in a corners for strength of a part.
* Flat corners, for chamfers (what do do when N>3 corners meet?)
* What else?
Ideally you might be able set the corner type separately for inside vs outside corners, or on a per-vertex or (in the most granular case) per-incoming-edge basis? Is that crazy?
How do saddle corners[0] behave? Does it just "work out" and (by some miracle) uniquely resolve for all permutations and corner types?
It certainly gets complex quickly!
[0] center, where the cubes all intersect https://entitleblogdotorg3.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/esche...
The hard part of 3 corners fillets is the tolerances. Each of those fillet operations has its own compounding float errors and when they meet, the intersection is so messy that they often do not intersect at all. This breaks almost every downstream algorithm because they depend on point classification to determine whether an arbitrary point is inside the manifold, outside, or sitting on an edge or vertex.
And that description of the problem is just scratching the surface. Three corner filets create a singularity in UV space at the common vertex so even when you find a solution to the tolerance problem you still have to deal with the math breaking down and a combinatorial explosion of special cases, almost each of which has to be experimentally derived.
bonus: minowski hull with a round pyramid adds chamfers in the vertical and fillets in the horizontal, which is what i want for 3d printing most of the time. additionally it closes small overhangs, and it makes fonts smoother (i.e. fonts don't extrude in a 90degree angle, and get 45degree instead, and print better on vertical faces)
disclaimer: I havent used openscad for about a year and my memory may be fuzzy
edit: i am not saying minowsky hull would directly solve your problem, but maybe the algorithm gives you inspiration to solve your numerical issues
All of the major commercial geometric kernels have been working on these problems for thirty years and I’m sorry, but your five minutes experience with a glorified tessellator isn’t going to make progress on long standing computational geometry problems.
>that’s not good enough for real world manufacturing and simulation
In theory pi has infinite places, sure . In real-world practice (vs math-lympics) you never need more than 100 digits, and indeed you rarely ever actually need more than 5.
Why doesn't it work to "just" throw more bit-width and more polygons at it? Who out there actually needs more than that (vs who just thinks they do)?
> indeed you rarely ever actually need more than 5.
That’s not how math works. With every operation the precision falls, and with floats the errors accumulate. What was five digits quickly becomes 3 digits and now you’ve got three surfaces that are supposed to, but don’t technically intersect because their compounding errors don’t overlap even though the equations that describe them are analytically exact. Modern geometric kernels have 3 to 7 tolerance expansion steps that basically brute force this issue when push comes to shove.
Once you have these discontinuities, a lot of critical math like finite element modeling completely breaks down. The math fundamentally depends on continuous functions. Like I mentioned above, three corner filets create a singularity in parametric space by default, so even the core algorithms that kernels depend on to evaluate surfaces break on a regular basis on basic every-day operations (like a box with smoothed edges - aka almost every enclosure in existence)
> Who out there actually needs more than that (vs who just thinks they do)?
I can’t stress this enough: almost everyone. CAD isn’t one of those fields where you can half ass it. Even the simplest operations are bound to create pathological and degenerate cases that have to be handled, otherwise you have a pile of useless garbage instead of a 3d model.
Slicers deal with meshes, like video game renderers, not boundary representations like CAD kernels. There is effectively zero overlap. Even just tessellation, the step that converts brep to mesh, is significantly harder than anything 3d printing software has to do.
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.
There are many geniuses on HN for tacking up challenge
As noted elsethread, there's only one geometric kernel which is decently far along and opensource and it's over 1 million LOC --- I doubt it's being included in any training data, and I doubt that an LLM could regurgitate such a large project which would then compile w/o errors and then work as expected --- the number of tokens required to get such a project to an initial state is a marked hurdle as well.
^1: Which I really appreciate, but let's be real, it is far behind eg. parasolid.
Dune3D is more like Solvespace with a few improvements and bug fixes vs being anywhere near FreeCAD in terms of capability. Improvements include using STEP files in assemblies and having some ability to make Fillets or Chamfers. Bugs fixes would be due to using OCCT for NURBS surfaces - solvespace frequently fails with NURBS boolean operations.
As for overall capability, FreeCAD does everything these others do but also supports lofting and other modeling options, BIM for architecture, I think it does pre- and post- processing for FEA, and maybe some other "big tool" things.
Neat that they got it working in the browser.
FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives.
I find the rendering side of things under developed though.
FreeCAD has become much better, no denying it.
"Amazing" is however not the word I would use though, the UI is still very convoluted and very hard to learn.
The worst part in FreeCAD, and which remains true to this day is the load of minutia you need to know to handle/avoid weird corner cases that you inevitable run into when you start building complex models and where FreeCAD stubbornly refuses to let you carry on with your work.
When you paint yourself into one of these corners, the software is hugely unhelpful when it comes to understanding what you did wrong and how to correct it.
In short, the word "Amazing" only works if you compare it to the absolute abomination the UI was a few years back.
But compare FreeCAD today to, for example, how slick Fusion is, there is still a very, very wide gap.
Finally, the geometry engine, is a somewhat old and creaky thing that sometimes downright fails to compute fillets or surface/surface intersections correctly, so yeah, YMMV.
FreeCAD is however, free software, and not controlled by one of the worst corp. in the world of software: Autodesk. So huge thumbs up there.
For free and open it's truly impressive though. Actually I think my time building iOS UIs in Storyboard was at least as useful as previous CAD experience, since constraints are the foundation of (at least one approach to) designing parts.
Fusion360 at least works on Linux
Photoshop/Lightroom don't.
Perhaps they have indeed become "one of the worst corp. in the world of software", but in the early years they were very interesting. The founder of Autodesk, John Walker (he died in 2024) wrote/edited and interesting book on the early years: "The Autodesk File" https://fourmilab.ch/autofile/
While I'm grateful Autodesk stepped in and kept TinkerCAD afloat, I'm relieved Sketchbook escaped their clutches, and am glad I never got involved in Fusion 360 so as to suffer from their on-going "rug pulls" --- which of these are a result of his influence, I've not found a need to discern.
SpeakFreely was his as well - a very early encrypted, VoIP app.
And this: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ ... As I said - an interesting person :-)
The fact anyone got a CAD kernel working in the browser is insane. Parsing the vagaries, vendor cruft, and gaping holes in STEP files has occupied a non-trivial amount of my career.
You want to talk about poisoned specs . . .
I did a major project with it in 2019 and it was great back then.
The issues it has are pretty minor. Admittedly I ended up using a fork for Assembly3(IIRC)
Anyhow, salutes to the author of this web port, very slick.
That credit goes to whitequark, who quit solvespace maintainership in 2020. The branch lingered and suffered some bit-rot. Then a couple people brought it up to date and fixed a few issues. It seemed like a good idea to merge it to prevent it falling behind even though its not quite up to par with desktop. With the newest release we also opted to put this right on the site (even merged a PR today as a result).
Anyway we owe whitequark most the credit for this one even though we havent heard from her in several years.
I implemented a full kernel in rust and compile it to wasm https://github.com/ecto/vcad
Minor nit: why does the rendered in-window text use a really awful pixelated font? It looks like what happens when a font gets rendered onto a pixel grid without any hinting or snapping.
https://www.unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html
Perhaps I've been using computers for too long but I actually like the non anti-aliased "sharp" and "pixely" look :-)
This is what it looks like on my screen: https://imgur.com/a/YeAdiXC
A good pixel font would be a vast improvement over this, though I'd still prefer something that scales well (and respects the DPI of my screen, and isn't too small compared to the menu font...).
I've tried Firefox, Chrome and Edge on Windows; Firefox and Chrome an Android phone and tablet and it renders correctly - like the desktop version.
What browser are you using? On what OS? Perhaps the web page is zoomed in/out in the browser? Scaling options in the browser? HiDPI screen with scaling?
Would you be willing to open an issue on GitHub with the details? Or just post them here.
Firefox is scaling its base size based on the screen, and then the page is scaled up further from there to have a readable font size. My base is 150% scaling, but the UI has comparably uneven strokes at many different scales and page sizes. (The strokes get less uneven the bigger they are, since at larger sizes there are more pixels to work with.)
Easy way to compare font scaling quality: At any scale, hitting one of the "change" links in the configuration menu brings up a browser UI element, using a font that looks great at any size.
Happy to file a report with the details.
Anyone having used both can share their thoughts about how solvespace and OnShape compare?
On my end I’ve been loving OnShape and find it pretty intuitive. I also tried fusion360 but closed it after 5 minutes, it felt too sluggish.
> {"type":"content_block_delta","delta":{"text":" search"}}
Since SolveSpace has a helix tool that can "extrude" any sketch along a helix it should be doable.
Edit: Forgot I also got doom running in openscad: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/openscad-doom/
and doom running in openscad in the browser at https://doom.mikeayles.com/
As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.
All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.
That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.
For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:
- Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based
- Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces
- Trimming surfaces
- Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)
- Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
It's also extremely slow: it implements chamfers and fillets using morpho, and if you have a large number of fillets, the morpho algorithms (minkowski / hull) are very much non linear in time on polygonal meshes, which leads to compute time explosion if you want a visually smooth result.
$fn = $preview ? 32 : 256;Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.
Is there an open-source "cleanroom" re-implementation of the Parasolid kernel? I just like the way Solidworks does things vs. Autodesk.
To pan around the space, use the right mouse button. To zoom, use the scroll wheel. To rotate, use Shift+Right mouse button.
Why not play with it a little bit before dismissing it so suddenly? I don't need to mention to a Solidworks/Autodesk user that CAD tools take some patience to understand properly :-)
Or middle mouse button / click the scroll wheel.
By the way working in SolveSpace is extremely fast if you use keyboard shortcuts - almost everything can be dome with a shortcut key. No need to search for them - you can learn them by looking in the menus.
A very short "crash course" on the navigation is in the "Quick start:" section at the bottom of the download page. https://solvespace.com/download.pl The "demo video" on the home page is also a great starting point.
After that the "Tutorials" and "Reference" go in as much detail as one may want :-)
SolveSpace officially is supported on Windows (Vista-11), Linux and macOS, and compiles with Emscripten and runs in a browser.
However with a little effort it also compiles for and runs on Windows 2000.
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco...
So it runs on all the majour platforms from the last 26 years (excluding MacOS 9).
SolveSpace officially is supported on Windows (Vista-11), Linux and macOS, and compiles with Emscripten and runs in a browser.
However with a little effort it also compiles for and runs on Windows 2000.
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/1036#issueco...
So it runs on all the majour platforms from the last 26 years (excluding MacOS 9).
Has worked quite okay for me thus far for semi professional & hobby projects
That 3MB also includes gnu unifont, the builtin vector font, and the 3js viewer for when you export models to html (viewer gets bundled in the file)
So the web version of SolveSpace is literally one megabyte of WebAssembly.