jrflo12 minutes ago
Neat, but I don't really see the utility. The time consuming part of CAD drawing comes from figuring out the correct dimensions of each feature, spacing, sizing, tolerances, etc., and constraining the drawing in a way so that it's easy to tweak later on- which this doesn't do at all. Maybe you could draw a 2d sketch of what you want then generate it, but you'd still have to do the hard part.
achllle2 hours ago
I wanted to see how well it performed on real pictures of parts or hand-drawn drawings, but when I tried setting up the docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed. The examples make me suspect it doesn't work well beyond images that were generated from CAD in the first place.
xiaoyu20069 minutes ago
> docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed
Ironically the former is engineered to avoid the latter.
atoavan hour ago
If only there was some kind of container that allowed you to bundle all your dependencies together with your software.
geuis2 hours ago
To the author if they happen to see this. Please kill the auto playing video. If someone is listening to something else on their phone this always takes over and interrupts.
whatsupdog10 minutes ago
TIL: people are still browsing the internet without an ad blocker.
cjtrowbridge4 hours ago
This has been easy with OpenSCAD for a long time. I have made lots of cool, complex models this way. I built a repo of the prompts I use to show the llm how to do this and it includes many of the models I've created this way...
oasisaimlessly3 hours ago
OpenSCAD has almost zero crossover with B-rep modelling ('true' CAD, what this apparently is), though.
twelvechairs28 minutes ago
OpenSCAD uses CSG which is generally better. Easy to convert CSG to BREP. Cant generally do the opposite
iamgopalan hour ago
how hard it is ? with AI prevalent, how long ? any pointers to start from ?
bschwindHNan hour ago
If you want something based on B-Rep, look at projects that use opencascade under the hood, as that is one of the only B-Rep CAD kernels available which is free and open source. Some examples would be CADQuery, CascadeStudio, or RepliCAD.
alexgoodhart2 hours ago
What is the inference overhead on this
jvanderbot4 hours ago
Same. Working with an LLM and OpenSCAD has been totally painless.
richk4493 hours ago
I’ve been using cadquery and build123 with Claude code and I find it incredibly painful.
What is your workflow for llm integration to openscad?
clippy9944 minutes ago
Maybe I missed something, if you have the image rendering in the first place, you already (likely) have the CAD. It is a nice demo, but what is the utility?
ecto2 hours ago
Readers may also enjoy my open source Rust BRep CAD kernel https://github.com/ecto/vcad or the hosted version at https://vcad.io.
I also wrote a bit about what goes into CAD apps! https://campedersen.com/tessellation
ecto2 hours ago
(forgot to mention, it's wired up to Claude so you can vibe CAD, like OP but with a few more steps - I'd like to train a similar model soon! I also wrote about my first stab at this https://campedersen.com/cad0)
andrew_kwak32 minutes ago
Checked out GenCAD. It seems pretty useful for simple circuit designs. Wondering if it supports import/export with other CAD formats?
isaisabellaan hour ago
The demo seems pretty cool, but also pretty simple. When it comes to complicate models, I afriad it would be hard to generate the accurate 3D model.
mamami4 hours ago
Ideally it would tie in with an llm, no? Like you would want to be able to say something like "create a design of car suspension subject to x,y,z contrains"
cush4 hours ago
The input is images, and the output is CAD models, so it appears you could use a multi-modal LLM to natural language -> image -> CAD
ugh1233 hours ago
The examples they show are so basic.
knollimar5 hours ago
It says "can convert cad latents into a sequence of parametric CAD commands"
Which CAD program? I'm confused
Am I reading this right?
>Most importantly, GenCAD does not merely generate a 3D solid but also the entire CAD program.
dbcurtis4 hours ago
> Which CAD program? I'm confused
Clue here: > Our proposed GenCAD architecture...
So, at this point, it seems like this will work with all CAD programs, since they have yet to encounter any systems that they can't work with. More seriously, my guess would be whatever one is available for free in their lab. Kind of standard operating procedure for academic projects -- do a proof of concept, make a video that avoids known bugs, get a grade, push source to git, graduate. Good ideas come out of that... production code... eh... maybe.
More likely someone ends up in the situation that my kid did, previous graduate student's git repo is stale by 2 versions of C++, and 4 versions of ROS, and neither of the two unit tests still work after porting.
hug4 hours ago
It's DeepCAD* output, it looks like, which is a JSON payload that is the sketch / extrude / whatever steps, which is itself based on Onshape output.
Looks like you can go JSON -> step files, but not really in such a way that you can modify any of the operations.
lagrange775 hours ago
> Which CAD program?
Doesn't matter. CAD models/objects are represented by a sequence of operations on a primitive or sketch. Unlike meshes, that describe the manifested resulting shape of objects in 3D programs like Blender.
So it's about the fact, that their model outputs that hierarchy of operations. The history of development, not just the result.
SchemaLoad4 hours ago
How does it not matter? Every CAD program is not going to have exactly the same interface and commands. I doubt for example this will for example generate and OpenSCAD text file.
plumeria4 hours ago
It could be used as pseudo-code for LLMs to produce specific CAD commands?
martinpwan hour ago
It will still be application dependent.
Code to compute fillets and blends gets incredibly complex when multiple surfaces are involved. And when surfaces are barely intersecting, or almost coincident, all bets are off what the command will do - very much depends on the geometry kernel and the tolerances it uses whether it decides the surfaces even intersect. And if it decides they don't intersect, all downstream commands will fail. Handling tolerances is one of the hardest aspects of CAD. (It's no coincidence that most open source CAD applications always demo with the same relatively basic types of models - they just can't do truly complex CAD.)
So a simple set of operations - cube, sphere, intersect - sure that will work anywhere and will be portable across applications and makes a nice simple demo. But once you start doing any serious CAD modeling the result is kernel dependent. That's why portable CAD formats like STEP do not preserve the commands used to generate the results. And why native CAD application formats do preserve the command history but are not portable across applications.
SchemaLoad4 hours ago
It could be anything which is why the question was asked what it actually outputs. I had a skim through the page and code but couldn't see what the output was.
itishappy3 hours ago
Nothing stops you from storing a history of mesh operations. This is exactly what modifiers (including geometry nodes) do in Blender today.
[deleted]4 hours agocollapsed
simpleintheory4 hours ago
Is this Google-affiliated? The heading font is Product/Google Sans which IIRC only Alphabet is allowed to use and the entire webpage seems to be Google-style but neither of the two named researchers seem to be employed by Google?
vpzom3 hours ago
Per https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans/license
"These fonts are licensed under the Open Font License. You can use them in your products & projects – print or digital, commercial or otherwise."
simpleintheory3 hours ago
Yeah, TIL, turns out they changed the license: it used to be under https://fonts.google.com/license/productsans
Rianyan hour ago
the idea is good, but the examples still feel like a distance to handle real constraints and dimensions
nik282000an hour ago
Website renders so poorly on my phone that I cant read half the text. Fits the bill for a slop project.
ironhaven4 hours ago
A another take on this problem is zoo.dev . They wrote a brand new from scratch cad engine that is driven a custom openscad style language called kcl.
Then then have a trained llm that has can generate kcl to either create new parts or act as a llm assistant for changes to existing parts.
It’s neat that llms can do 3-D but I wonder how much of the problem is integration.