SolveSpace is a wonderfully different take on parametric CAD, but development has really slowed, and it seems fundamentally incapable of some pretty rudimentary features (like chamfers[0]). Dune 3D[1] seems like a pretty effective spiritual successor.
Chamfers and Fillets are my next major undertaking. Don't expect them any time soon, but they've moved to the top of my list. They are extremely difficult to do in the general case - so we will not cover all cases. Several years ago I tried an experiment:
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'm curious why you didn't go with OCCT for Solvespace.
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.
Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT (or make it optional)? It would make certain things such as fillets/chamfers much easier, I suppose, and it would make those boolean operation bugs go away. And exporting to various formats would be easy.
>> Would it be worthwhile to consider switching to OCCT
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.
I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets.
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
Some years ago I tried to learn CAD by doing some FreeCAD tutorials, and failed. But I hear 1.0 was a big step forward, and the recently released 1.1 is also a big step, and it should be somewhat decent nowadays. Maybe I need to try again one day.
There are more than dozen different viewport navigation manipulation modes, latest version added two more (Solidworks and Siemens NX). You can pick whichever behaves closest to the program you are most used to.
I’ve wondered how feasible it would be to start building browser-based CAD/design products to replace our expensive and poorly supported paid plugins and niche products. Seems promising!
FreeCAD is amazing these days. It has completely replaced my use of Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking projects. It is capable and the UI is understandable. Its feature depth is incredible.
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.
"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.
This is really accurate to my experience learning FreeCAD earlier this year. I am a former professional CAD user (of a lesser software than AutoCAD) and I don't think I would have gotten far without being able to ask ChatGPT for help understanding some of the quirks of FreeCAD.
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.
Yeah anything involving 2d art I confess I just send to Blender, even technical illustration, with the exception of O&D style sheets.
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.
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.
It uses GNU unifont, which is a bitmap font. There could be a bug causing the text to get stretched a little - we had that on Windows prior to this release.
Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them!
> I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice
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)
I might have misunderstood what you're looking to do, but, yeah, digging deeper feels very much like the right thing to do.
using BOSL2 alleviates most issues I've run into with OpenScad for chamfers and the like, but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly
> BOSL2 ... but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly
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.
The mouse wheel zooms. The bounds of the axis stay fixed on the screen however. It will become more intuitive if you draw a circle to the screen first.
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 :-)
This is expected behavior. The zoom action is into the cursor center. This is the same behavior of many other 2d/3d editors, such as Autodesk Autocad, Inventor, etc. Even MS Paint does this. If you place your cursor perfectly at the origin, it will not appear to drift.
0: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/149
1: https://dune3d.org/
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?
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 ;-)
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea.
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
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.
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)
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.
[0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com
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:
I might have misunderstood what you're looking to do, but, yeah, digging deeper feels very much like the right thing to do.https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2
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.
Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580583
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.