atomCAD Alternatives

atomCAD reviews and mentions

• PartCAD the first package manager for CAD models
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023

  I'm working on an MPL-licensed, free forever CAD environment for molecular nanotechnology. It is extremely early, indeed I hesitate to even mention it as it is currently undergoing the final stages of a rewrite to run on a game engine back-end, and it isn't much more than boilerplate at the moment. But we have a small community of people interested in this, and we are currently raising money to support further development, among other things.

  The key point though is that the atomistic modeling is sort-of an add-on to a bog-standard CAD workflow. You still use boolean geometry to produce surface representations, even if those surfaces are discretized crystal structures.

  I had intended that once it was up and running I would reach out to some people I know that are interested in a more modern alternative to FreeCAD. Perhaps it would make sense to combine efforts?

  [1] https://github.com/atomCAD/atomCAD

• Bevy and WebGPU
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 May 2023

  Thank you! I just started with bevy this week, and it's a bit overwhelming, but in a weird and mostly good way. The way components and systems work is fucking magic, the kind of stuff you'd expect of Rails or Django, but not in a real-time framework in a systems programming language.

  The good is that whole applications can be written in just a handful of mostly declarative code, which is absolutely amazing! The bad is that with all the magic being handled by macros and back-end event processing loops, it can be a little intimidating and how to see how it is constructed under the hood. I would love to see a class diagram showing both the extant objects and their types, and the control flow during a frame update.

  But anyway, thank you for all your hard work and for the response. Now I know where to go first in the source code to do what I need to do.

  > If you want to build a wgpu-based renderer, you have a couple of options depending on what kind of rendering you need. You can plug in your own custom renderer instead of bevy_pbr using bevy_core_pipeline. You can still use bevy_pbr and just add your own render nodes on top of it.

  I actually have my own wgpu-based renderer done (https://github.com/atomCAD/atomCAD/), so maybe that's the first thing to try. Thanks!

  > I encourage you to join Bevy's discord channel and discuss your project in the #rendering channel, it's much easier to provide help and give info than over a forum.

  Will do.