3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality

Re:3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality by angersock on Thursday February 14, 2013 @07:05PM (#5223516)

Honestly, my concern is that something like the GIMP will take over in the open-source CAD space, and stymy efforts for making something as useful and powerful as Solidworks. We've seen this happen before--let's try to avoid it.

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Re:3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality by nickpinkston on Thursday February 14, 2013 @10:16PM (#5224224)

There is: FreeCAD, based on the OpenCASCADE kernel.

SolidWorks is just so easy to pirate, that no one has much motivation. It's a massive effort to build something like this.

Also, it requires a multi-disciplinary team: math, programming, MechE / ID, UX, etc. - it'd be hard for an open source project to do this without some type of funded entity.

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Re:3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality by zanny on Friday February 15, 2013 @12:23AM (#5224600)

Hey, FreeCAD allows python scripting, I'm game. *

*: got about 30 minutes into trying it a couple times before banging my head on a wall, goes back and plays with Blender.

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Re:3D Printing Revolution: The Complex Reality by nickpinkston on Friday February 15, 2013 @04:21AM (#5225284)

You can try OpenSCAD - but it's its own 3D language, but pretty intuitive.

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