Show HN: Chili3d – A open-source, browser-based 3D CAD application

I’m doing a bit of BREP for GIS and even in 2D with line segments only the problem is really non-trivial, a lot of edge (pun intended) cases to take care of. Type system helps enormously, so probably rust will be a win here (I think I saw a project along those lines).

That being said, for CAD (personal usage) I switched from Fusion 360 to Freecad 1.0 with almost no project and the latter is an order of magnitude faster.

I think the corner cases are likely hard, but the fundamental mathematical representations of the 3D geometry haven't changed. If the licensing cost of Parasolid and ASICs is reasonable, there isn't really a commercial incentive to create something new from scratch. The current market trend is consolidation as Autodesk and Hexagon when on a buying spree and bought up a lot of CAD and CAM software.

OpenCASCADE used to be commercial, but they couldn't find enough customers to keep on and it got open sourced after a failed commercial existence.

Would love to read more about how these types of geometric problems are best approached.

We don't really have a lot of options as far as open source geometry kernels goes.

OpenCascade

CGAL

Is there anything else?

As someone who works in a school with Chromebooks, I love that web apps like this exist, especially if students will be able to export the files to a 3D printer. It greatly opens up the number of tools we can use to do fun things.

That said, also as a teacher and a parent, I worry that Chromebooks are making kids have no idea about the world of non-web-apps. (And file systems, etc. etc.)

I watch my kid create a poster: find an image online, copy & paste into an automatic background remover, c&p into an image editing program to remove the watermark, c&p into Canva for assembling with text etc.

Meanwhile I show her that I can do the whole thing on Pixelmator Pro (or Affinity or Photoshop) and she looks at me like I have three heads.

The current version does not include this, but it will be available as parametric components in the future.

OFC this being HN people are jumping on the side comment about web apps.

BUT the more relevant and valuable point you made was about constraints and sketches.

And, related to this, true parametric design, which IMO is vital for a CAD package to be taken seriously.

Browsers can be just as powerful as 'native' apps. This is an example of that. Browser apps free the user from proprietary operating systems and their companies. Of course, Linux is a way around that. However, why not just write it once and let students and engineers the world over be able to share and open files easily?

UPDATE: On my newer laptop thius is faster than my native apps. And I was literally drawing shapes within 30 seconds of clicking on the link to this app. Compare that to the nightmare of all the other tools out there with registrations, email clutter, 2FA, and on and on. Oh, and cost in most cases!

UPDATE 2: I have no connection to this team other than having just seen a post online about this tool. I've been navigating the world of SketchUp/AutoCad/Revit recently so this of course is totally thrilling. Especially for what it means for the future.

CADmium is built with the Truck kernel, though it looks like CADmium has no repo activity since June '24. https://github.com/CADmium-Co/CADmium

There's also the Fornjot kernel. https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot

> This looks super nice! That is kind of the interface I wish FreeCAD could have.

What do you dislike about FreeCAD's interface?

Onshape employee here. I agree with another poster that for most "non-professional" requirements Onshape's free tier is all one should need - sure, the documents remain public if you don't pay. It's prohibitively expensive to maintain the technology stack with the complexity, scale and performance that Onshape does, and its costs a lot of money. :)

otoh onshape free tier feels very generous to me.

Might be worth getting in contact with the Slant3D folks, their teleport 3d printing service might benefit from an integrated editor?

Yes, these functions are not available yet.

Oh, thanks! I will revise the translation.

Perhaps Blender w/ CADsketcher?

https://www.cadsketcher.com/

Or maybe NASA's Vehicle Sketch Pad?

https://software.nasa.gov/software/LAR-17491-1

Since I assume that spaceships are more an artistic thing, go for Blender.

this isn't really answering your question,

however with opencascade working in webassembly here, perhaps also cadquery and/or build123d can do something like that

The deployed version can import STL files, but there are some limitations in use, such as being unable to snap feature points.

I don't think your understanding is correct.

In the 60s, 70s, and 80s it was more true, but nowadays Catia, NX, Creo, and the other big CAD systems are monolithic applications with extensions and add-ons (either from the vendor directly, sold as third party add-ons, or developed in house with CAA/NXOpen/ProToolkit) for doing stuff like composite design, sheet metal, various types of analysis, and a million other things.

Under the hood they're very modular with hundreds (or thousands) of shared library modules, and sometimes those modules have long histories going back to the 70s, but the UI of the 70s is long gone, and they're used like normal shared libraries, not piping around data on the shell.

Not that it doesn't happen - I'm sure some companies have old tools they haven't updated in decades - but the day to day CAD work is all GUI based.

That's my impression working at a company doing CAD translation, anyway.

In a lot of large deployments, the CAD data isn't even stored in files, but in a PLM database. For example PTC's WindChill and Dassault's Enovia/3DX.

I should say that this question is 100% not a backhanded critique of the idea of this project, I’m genuinely curious what the workflow looks like.

Making CAD more accessible seems like a massive win, in the sense that it is really hard to get hands on experience making things nowadays—hobbyist methods and professional ones have diverged quite far! Easy web-based tool that bridge that gap without playing around in the shell could be really useful.

I recently tested SimScale with OnShape, i.e. cloud FEM with cloud CAD. On the FEM side there was a button "import from OnShape", which opened popup that did go through authz flow ("do you want to allow SimScale to access your OnShape content") and then proceeded to show a part/assembly selection dialog. Reasonably smooth process considering that they are two completely separate companies etc.

Yes. Make them a front end to project database you pay someone to host. There is one source of truth for the whole team, front ends are tailored to design disciplines, and development branches are created as needed. This is an obvious product that would be a major improvement that doesn’t exist.

Bentley and Autodesk have a Frankenstein version of this because they can’t disrupt their revenue stream for CAD software that stopped improving 20 years ago. iTwin (yes, the branding is that bad) is an attempt to link cloud to local-file-based work. ProjectWise was a first stab at that, which is worse than plain network storage in every way except that CAD managers don’t have to be responsible for configuration scripts.

CAD companies are very protective of their file formats, and use that as leverage to "encourage" companies to stay in their eco system, and upgrade to the latest versions of their software.

The main CAD program is often the center of use, and any specialty functionality is a add-in to the main cad program (FEA, CAM, etc).

If the specialty software is stand-alone, it still needs a CAD Kernel to be able to work with the BREP, and there are essentially only 2 main commercial kernels (Parasolid and ASICs).

Not your main question but -

” very old-school native programs that either are a loosely collected group of tools that allow you to manipulate files and pass them around”

Opencascade is a C++ library and manages it’s state in single process. Examples: https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/overview/html/samples.html

That really seems like it is written by someone without any experience using 3D CAD, particularly of the "make physical stuff" variety, rather than the artistic movie and video game asset variety.

English (or other human) language is pretty bad at describing 3D geometry. People have been using drawings and physical 3D models to describe designs going way back into antiquity. The idea you can just use text suitable for a current-design LLM to manipulate 3D technical data really seems like an idea from someone who has never tried.

But also, Solidworks and Inventor (and I think NX) have extensive API coverage that would allow an LLM to manipulate the geometry data, if the LLM could figure out what the data meant, and what it wants to do. If you can do it on screen with a mouse and keyboard, you can likely do it over the API. An add-in could certainly be written to accept requests for information and instructions on api calls to make from an LLM.

I’ve found ”So what did you do” is usually obvious to domain experts and incomprehensible without understanding of the domain without _very_ long readme that would be comparable in complexity to a review article.

>Are they responsible for that Microsoft Office ribbon UI?

Well, that's the beauty of open source. Go read it.

https://github.com/xiangechen/chili3d/blob/43161b9f51021f2ef...

>When I look at this, it's so sophisticated it just makes me feel think about the widening divide as far as AI skill gap goes. Was AI used?

I feel like this was the "So tell me about your father.." turn here , did you really care about the details or did you want to wax poetic about AI?