Posted by joachimhs 5 days ago
Do you have plans to release it for desktop (maybe using Electron)? One of my main complains about tools like Tinkercad is that they are browser-based, and it's easier/faster to have everything local. That's one of the reasons that I moved to OpenSCAD
Technically no, but in that sense everything cloud-based is local in some machine.
I wouldn't consider it "local" if I need to run a web server (!), "upload" if I want to open file or "download" to save it locally. This is client-server approach where both my machine acts as both client and server.
Ideally also ability to drag faces like plasticity.
i'm convinced this will always be the case and that the right approach, if there is one, is to take an industrial grade cad/modeling suite and attach a guided 'novice' interface onto it rather than making a novice-based cad system from scratch.
I haven't seen an example of that, either -- but it feels like an easier approach.
CAD/CAM software with Cartesian planes are already confusing as is for most folks. Once I started watching some videos discussing tolerances and such from an engineer perspective, the layout, tooling and concepts made a lot more sense to me.
At that point, it's essentially understanding the intention of the tools and if you're performing additive manufacturing or subtractive. A lot of CAD/CAM software is geared toward machine shops and setups and mindsets like that and not necessarily 3D printer-esque communities. I think these solutions are great for the 3D crowd and not so much the engineer.
There are some in-between things that break the mold and do things in unique ways for people who are product designers like Rhino. The node editing in that is so cool. I look forward to seeing what more people can do with AI now and scripting.
I'm reminded of the concept of "ejecting" from e.g. Create React App a few years back - the idea was that if your beginner-friendly interface is actually built on the same underlying engine (in this case bundler and deployment assumptions) you can have full fidelity when you need customization, albeit with a one-way transition.
In the JS world things moved more towards build systems where beginner-friendly-DX and full-configurability could coexist. I'm not sure that CAD has the same dynamic.
Perhaps something like nested layers could work: you can use a complex model as a layer, but only opaquely, and build things around it with solids-and-holes; you can then lift that to itself a complex model, do things with professional CAD, and then treat the result itself as an opaque complex model if you switch back? That gets complicated fast.
Why can't we have both ?
But then when I get to the bottom, I feel like what I saw did not really satisfy me - but hey! Look! There's a menu at the top with promising sounding entries!
And then I click on something and instead of getting something new, it just scrolls the page... so, I've already seen everything. That feels like a big disappointment every time.
I use BlockSCAD a lot --- maybe an option for more math-oriented students?
Some quick testing:
I really wish the dimension objects around the editable dimensions were draggable (the "nudges" (up/down spin arrows) are nice).
I couldn't get "Hole" to function as I expected (assumed it would remove itself from all other objects).
No panning of the 3D view?
Are there “simple” tooling for doing 3D sculpting using quests? Any recommendations?
Then I see that I can self host it. This is interesting novelty.
But there were so many bad apples in CAD area, that I will stick with FreeCAD and after 20 years, if this will evolve and prove it is just not another scam, happily give it a try.