sdf VS opencascade-emscripten-port

I used to like OpenSCAD for its simple approach but then I discovered SDF-based modelling with Python made possible with this neat library: [1]. This is perfect if you are a programmer that doesn't know anything about CAD-Software.

1.: https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

>these the the central core that understands BREP and implements the geometric operations.

I've seen people quote a good modern CAD kernal as a 100 man year project. It's probably not going to happen, maybe there's some avenue for government funding?

Alternatively Signed-Distance-Functions are pretty nice. They're not BREP, but they're a lot easier to implement, and it might be possible to shove them into a BREP-shaped hole.

Here's a signed-distance-function based CAD kernal written in a few thousand lines of python+numpy, that seems to be about as fast as openscad. Maybe faster. https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

Excellent. You might be interested in a Python library that I wrote for generating 3D meshes (STL files) from SDFs : https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

It just uses marching cubes for triangulation but the SDFs are all numpy'd and the SDF is evaluated in batches on multiple threads so it's relatively fast.

I used the SDF repo by Michael Fogleman. Check out his website, there's a ton of useful stuff on there. He contributes a lot to the open source community and has been mentioned in r/PlotterArt before.

Try out fogleman/sdf[1]. It is like OpenSCAD in many ways but the distance field model gives you offsets and fillets more easily.

[1] https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

https://github.com/fogleman/sdf this python project can create mesh from sdf

> https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

Holy crap, why have I not seen this before?!?!!? I was even planning to start coding something like this myself. This is awesome!

There is an OpenCascade version compiled down to wasm [1] that we're currently using embedded in our own app. Rendering to WebGL is relatively straight-forward and the system as a whole works well. Gives me a lot of power when designing mechanical systems and running simulations on the resulting models. Perf of the CAD kernel on the web is not great, but 'just good enough'.

Troubleshooting issues is tricky though. If something doesn't work debugging is nearly impossible and the (C++) docs are very challenging.

OpenCascade is very powerful, but the ergonomics of the API aren't great. Writing a simple FP-style immutable wrapper around it has proven very fruitful and we can now describe relatively complicated models with a bare minimum of TypeScript code. Lot's of fun!

[1] https://github.com/gabrielcuvillier/opencascade-emscripten-p...