Block CAD (this) versus Blocks CAD[1]. As a disclaimer I use OpenSCAD and have long thought that the interface would lend itself nicely to the scratch-style paradigm, but I've never bothered since the default OpenSCAD + git + Cura has been more than enough for what I need
TIL about jupyterlab-blockly https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/other_ex... :
> The JupyterLab-Blockly extension is ready to be used as a base for other projects: you can register new Blocks, Toolboxes and Generators. It is a great tool for fast prototyping."
jupyter-cadquery: https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery
"Generate code from GUI interactions" https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker/issues/90
Why cadquery instead of OpenSCAD: https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad...
/? awesome finite element analysis site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+finite+element+analy...
AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... :
>
blender_jarvis - Control Blender through text prompts with help of ChatGPT*> Blender-GPT - An all-in-one Blender assistant powered by GPT3/4 + Whisper [speech2text] integration
> BlenderGPT
> chatGPT-maya - Simple Maya tool that utilizes open AI to perform basic tasks based on descriptive instructions.
Checkout MangoJelly's "FreeCAD 0.20 For Beginners Tutorials" and follow along. It will change your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXN7TOg3kj4&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...
I noped out of FreeCAD in the first minute after I downloaded it and tried it. I'll open it again right now and record my thoughts:
I open up FreeCAD and am immediately annoyed. A splash page takes multiple seconds on an M1 Pro, and then I'm dumped into a empty page with a mess of buttons around it.
Why are there browser UI elements and buttons for "set URL" and "open website"?
I click around and realize there are different "workbenches" which are different UIs for making different types of parts. The UI feels sluggish, and it's hard to tell whether a button is disabled or not. Clicking any button seems to take hundreds of milliseconds to respond.
I go into the Drawing workbench to attempt to make something. There are two buttons with identical iconography (a piece of paper with a shiny light on the top right). One means "new empty document" (what is a document?), and the other is... Open SVG (?)
Right now I am just attempting to draw a sketch or _something_ like that. I guess Drawing wasn't the right workbench. Moving to "part design" now.
Ahh, finally the combination of "create new document" and then "create body", then "create sketch", then "select workplane" _finally_ puts me in a view to start creating something. I am assaulted with what seems to be around 30 new buttons with unintuitive icons which I need to hover over to decipher their meaning (at least they have hovertext!)
The rendering window at this point is quite tiny compared to my screen, and it's rendering at what seems to be around 30 FPS on a 120 Hz display.
I saved my project to a file, and it dumps out some binary thing. Good luck with version control on that I guess.
I'll stop here, but overall FreeCAD just feels gross to use, and it needs a lot more than just tutorials to increase its usage.
Compare to SolveSpace, which loads instantly, puts you immediately into a mode where you can start creating, renders at my screen refresh rate, and doesn't overwhelm me with UI elements I don't need until I'm actually doing something related to them. I know SolveSpace has way less features compared to FreeCAD, and it also has its confusing moments as well, but it actually has decent taste in its UI and UX, and runs very responsively (as all applications should with the kinds of computers we have these days).
At least SolveSpace has assemblies. FreeCAD has four different community plugins which all are wonky in their own ways.
I don't know if I'm just weird, but to me assembly is kinda fundamental feature of CAD. I mean you'd think your basic workflow is to design some parts and then see if they actually fit together, but apparently that sort of thing is not what FreeCAD is for.
You actually can save to kinda VCSable folders of XML, but it will spam the history with UI changes mixed in with actual changes.
But even then, any advanced CAD software is not the type of soft software that you can open and "figure out".
Personally, I've always found free cared to be very unintuitive - the whole UI/UX feels hostel to the user.
aka constructive solid geometry (CSG)? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_solid_geometry
On second thought, that must exist, in fact, that might even be how Blender and such serialize their content.
For years I've had "node based CAD" on my ideas list. I imagined something like Blender's shader nodes, but this is even better.
