After looking at some videos of what this even is, I'd say it can do it but will likely fail on the boolean operation where the two spirals intersect. It might work fine but it's an operation likely to trigger a bug, and it would be sensitive to the exact placement/pitch of everything. Having said that, using the "force to triangle mesh" option solvespace will probably work fine. That should be sufficient for the home 3D printing crowd to make some fun stuff, but you won't be able to save a STEP file then. Just my guess as to how this might go.
>> Anyhow, salutes to the author of this web port, very slick
That credit goes to whitequark, who quit solvespace maintainership in 2020. The branch lingered and suffered some bit-rot. Then a couple people brought it up to date and fixed a few issues. It seemed like a good idea to merge it to prevent it falling behind even though its not quite up to par with desktop. With the newest release we also opted to put this right on the site (even merged a PR today as a result).
Anyway we owe whitequark most the credit for this one even though we havent heard from her in several years.
Even the desktop version sometimes. If I open on one monitor and move to another with different scale factor. It seems Windows lies about window resolution.
Dune3D is more like Solvespace with a few improvements and bug fixes vs being anywhere near FreeCAD in terms of capability. Improvements include using STEP files in assemblies and having some ability to make Fillets or Chamfers. Bugs fixes would be due to using OCCT for NURBS surfaces - solvespace frequently fails with NURBS boolean operations.
As for overall capability, FreeCAD does everything these others do but also supports lofting and other modeling options, BIM for architecture, I think it does pre- and post- processing for FEA, and maybe some other "big tool" things.
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.
>> 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.
Yeah. To quantify, OCCT is >1M lines of code, and SolveSpace's NURBS kernel is <10k. This general smallness is what subsequently made stuff like the browser target feasible, though it obviously comes with downsides too.
We'd welcome contributions, and it's much easier to contribute to the smaller codebase. I think there's potential for coding agents to accelerate this work since robust point-in-shell and shell-is-watertight tests are mostly sufficient to judge correctness, allowing the agent to iterate; loosely you could define your geometric operation as a function of whether a point should lie within the output region, then ask the agent to convert that to b-rep. I wouldn't currently expect useful progress without deep human effort and understanding though.
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.
Perhaps you could create both the shell and the OCCT object. Then when an edge is chamfered, you could look it up in the OCCT object (simply find all segments which are sufficiently close to the chamfered edge). And then call the OCCT chamfer function. Or something along those lines.
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