Carrying the torch of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
...
# linking-togetherk
Kartik Agaram
03/08/2024, 5:09 AM
Carrying the torch of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad
https://solvespace.com
🔥 1
🍰 5
j
Joshua Horowitz
03/08/2024, 6:38 PMare there ways you see solvespace carrying this torch more than other CAD systems?
k
Kartik Agaram
03/09/2024, 1:01 AM
Nope, I'm not familiar with the space! Just saw the demo on the site.
đź‘Ť 1
Kartik Agaram
03/09/2024, 2:16 AM
@Joshua Horowitz I'd love to hear about other alternatives you like or use. I'm just starting to get interested in this space.
j
Jacob Zimmerman
03/11/2024, 4:24 PMI loved using Cuttle, made by a few people in here, but it’s 2D. It only took like 30 minutes for me to make clean parametrized drawings with zero prior experience.
❤️ 2
j
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:32 PMCuttle’s great, though I bet Kartik was in part attracted to the constraint system SolveSpace shows off prominently, which Cuttle doesn’t have.
đź‘Ť 1
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:35 PMI’m not very knowledgable about CAD. I’ve probably used Fusion 360 the most, but I’ve used it very little. It’s a big, professional CAD system: hard to use, powerful. I think it’s free for hobby / educational use, which is pretty neat. But it’s challenging to approach. Possibly more so than SolveSpace, which looks “cuter”.
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:39 PMFusion 360 targets engineering / product-design applications, as do tools like Inventor, SolidWorks, Onshape.
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:40 PMSketchUp & Tinkercad are more accessible online CAD/modeling programs accessible for free. I think SketchUp targets architectural applications (though it’s general), and Tinkercad targets hobby / educational use.
❤️ 1
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:42 PMIn the open source realm, SolveSpace is joined by FreeCAD (which I think is just the open-source attempt at a Fusion-360-like CAD system?) and OpenSCAD, which is a programming language rather than a direct-manipulation interface.
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:43 PMThat’s what I know! (Given my interest in programmatic drawings & direct-manipulation diagrams, I really ought to know this stuff better, but I don’t have much use for these tools so it’s hard to motivate digging in.)
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:47 PMOh and FWIW there’s some ambiguity here between “CAD” and “modeling”. Like, should I have listed Blender? IDK. There are some factors that seem to mark something as CAD, like support for constraints and features targeting manufacturing physical objects rather than modeling objects for virtual art (see also: CAM). But some things I listed probably don’t have those marks, and for all I know Blender has constraints?
k
Kartik Agaram
03/12/2024, 5:52 PM
Thanks so much for that brain dump! Funnily enough, what triggered this post for me was the realization that there's a category called "parametric CAD", and that what Ivan Sutherland was doing so long ago was in fact CAD. I'd somehow never put those two categories together in my head before. I had no idea constraints are so intrinsic to CAD.
j
Joshua Horowitz
03/12/2024, 5:59 PMYeah it’s interesting cuz there’s nothing in the nominal definition of CAD that requires constraints. And, indeed, tools like Cuttle, which I would absolutely call CAD, don’t use constraints. (You can have parameters without constraints if you start with parameters and use spreadsheet-style unidirectional dataflow, which is what Cuttle (and Apparatus) do.) BUT: In practice, professional CAD systems are very much oriented around defining shapes via constraints. It’s just kind of emerged as the “right” approach.
I might be off base with this read, but it looks like Wikipedia backs me up:
❤️ 1
10 Views