from Hacker News

SolveSpace – Parametric 2D/3D CAD

by cab404 on 5/22/22, 1:34 PM with 82 comments

• by phkahler on 5/22/22, 11:57 PM

  I keep a short file of quotes about solvespace:

  Ramez: "I love what you've done. It's plain brilliant. Thank you."

  Peneloppe PPE: "Thanks for this CAD Jesus,

  I have tried most if not all reputable CAD softwares and none of them felt great to me ( or did not keep my files hostage )...

  I have not yet imagined something I could not make with SolveSpace, the latest being a print in place bearing with 50 microns tolerances :P"

  Azial: "Omg, this render performance increase on macOS! Its sooo fluid, thank you so much!"

  Dave: "Solvespace is slowly but surely becoming the Inkscape of the CAD world..."

  timestretch (HN): "SolveSpace's precision, constraints, and great keyboard user interface make it a fun program to design parts in. It is among the best open source tools out there."

  It is quite an honor to be maintaining this piece of software that I did not create in the first place. We've passed the 50 contributor mark recently but can definitely use more help, it's a complex code base with huge capability for its size.

• by samwillis on 5/22/22, 4:56 PM

  SolveSpace is by far the most interesting thing happening in open source 3D parametric CAD, specifically because they have built their own advanced parametric CAD kernel and constraint solver. The only other "advanced" open source kernel is Open Cascade which is a little difficult to work with, and nowhere near the commercial Parasolid in its functionality and accessibility. I would love to see some significant sponsorship of SolveSpace, there is enormous potential for a modern and useable Parametric Kernel.

• by fimdomeio on 5/22/22, 7:20 PM

  A while ago I found CAD Sketcher https://www.cadsketcher.com/ which integrates SolveSpace constrain solver in Blender which while might still not be a fully useful working tool is pretty interesting to play with.

  While sketchup make 2017 is still my go to for anything architectural or furniture and Freecad for anything 3d print, Blender is always the app I whish I was using all the time, even knowing fully well is not the right tool for anything cad.

• by wiradikusuma on 5/22/22, 4:08 PM

  Slightly OOT: What software (can be paid) for designing a house? I'm a software engineer with no background in civil engineering / related fields. AutoCAD is too complex, Photoshop too abstract. I'm thinking the Sims :) But I need "real" measurements.

  The resulting design is not for commercial use but to be passed to the professionals (architect/builder). Simple enough for my mom to understand yet detailed enough for the professionals to know what I want precisely.

• by pengaru on 5/22/22, 3:05 PM

  This is by far my favorite CAD program for quick engineering-oriented designs.

  But it's not without its bugs, and frankly the performance seemed to steadily deteriorate as more of the code was "cleaned up" to use more modern C++/STL stuff over the years.

  I use a local fork from an older release that instead diverges even further away from using C++ crap in a very performance-sensitive area (the IdList indexing is done ad-hoc) and it's been far more usable for the large-ish models I tend to work on (designing sheds/roofs and cabin structures). The same models I work efficiently on are basically impossible to work with in current upstream releases (when I last tried them, admittedly pre-pandemic so years ago), almost every operation becomes a many-second stall.

  Edit:

  My local fork is based on Alexey Egorov's changes @

  https://github.com/Evil-Spirit/solvespace-master/tree/id-lis...

• by gamegod on 5/22/22, 4:01 PM

  This software is low key the best open source CAD software. Although it looks ancient, it's under active development and has a much lower learning curve than FreeCAD IMHO. It's a really good fit for the skill level of someone who has a 3D printer. I've designed dozens of parts for my printer and random crap around the house with Solvespace. It's a very useful tool.

• by grawp on 5/22/22, 5:05 PM

  I have a big conceptual problem with these interactive editors: I'm a programmer and am very used to splitting things into functions and objects which can be then called with / have different parameters and be composed into another functions and objects.

  So far my experience with both SolveSpace and FreeCAD have been: Even if you can reuse a part of your design multiple times (and even this is a nontrivial problem), you surely can't do that with different parameters!

  My brain hurts from how it goes against all programming principles about DNRY, modularity, and composability.

• by deadsy on 5/22/22, 5:35 PM

  I wrote this (in golang) to satisfy my need to generate STLs for 3d printing.

  https://github.com/deadsy/sdfx

  In general I like to write code to define objects, but there are some situations where a graphical editing UI would be nice. ie- Curve and polygon design.

  You can sort of imagine a hybrid approach where you could crack open a mini editor to design a curve and then use it to generate code (table of numbers) which you could then extrude/sweep/loft or whatever.

• by ur-whale on 5/22/22, 3:12 PM

  This is a nice piece of software, but I wish they had a clean, documented Python API to be able to drive it purely programatically (à la OpenSCAD / CADQuery).

• by tastemykungfu on 5/22/22, 2:49 PM

  This feels like a terminal based 3d application, and I love it!

  I tried out "plasticity" (trying to get off of FreeCad) but prefer this as it's very simple to use.

• by crispisulcans on 5/22/22, 2:24 PM

  Love this piece of software! I tried a few other free CAD programs before and this is one my favorite.

• by genericone on 5/22/22, 5:50 PM

  I have to give this upvotes every few years this resurfaces on HN. This is the best option for visualizing linkages and the outputs from such mechanisms.

  It was lacking in one type of constraint, but it was open source so I was able to extend the code and contribute a feature after 8 years of weekly use.

• by chromatin on 5/22/22, 3:14 PM

  Although apparently(?) less engineering-oriented, check out OpenScad, which has a much wider install base and I think is more mature with a large ecosystem:

  https://openscad.org/

• by app4soft on 5/22/22, 9:01 PM

  JFYI, Here are my SolveSpace showcases (models & videos).[0]

  [0] https://git.io/DailySolveSpace

• by psyc on 5/22/22, 6:17 PM

  As someone with simple 2D drafting needs, who wanted a reason to throw QCAD out a 10th story window, thank you OP.

• by hello_marmalade on 5/22/22, 8:48 PM

  One issue is that they won’t add fillets and chamfers.

• by dapids on 5/22/22, 7:27 PM

  I was hoping this was a modelling software with solvers for electro/thermo/aero dynamics, etc. What is this solving?

• by boppo1 on 5/22/22, 8:07 PM

  What does this do that I can't do in Blender?

• by silencedogood3 on 5/22/22, 5:56 PM

  So why would I choose his over openscad? What’s better/worse?