Show HN: FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript
53 points - today at 6:39 PM
Hello HN users,
This is a CAD by code project I have been working on on my free time for more than year now.
I built it with 3 goals in mind:
- It should be familiar to CAD designers who have used other programs. Same workflow, same terminology.
- Reduce the mental effort required to create models as much as possible. This is achieved by:
- Provide live rendering and visual guidance as you type.
- Allow the user to reference existing edges/faces on the scene instead of having to calculate everything.
- Provide interactive mouse helpers for features that are hard to write by code: Only 3 interactive modes for now: Edge trimming, Sketch region extrude, Bezier curve drawing.
- Implicit coding whenever possible: e.g: There are sensible defaults for most parameters. The program will automatically fuse intersecting objects together so you do not have to worry about what object needs to be fused with what.I think I have achieved these goals to a good extent. The program is still in early stages and there are many features I want to add, rewrite but I think it is already usable for simple models.
Update to add more details: This is based on Opencascade.js WASM binding. So you get all the good things that come with any brep kernel. Fillets, chamfers, step import and export...
The scene is webview but the editing is in your local file. You use your own editor and the environment you are familiar with.
One important feature that I think make this stand out among other code based cad software is the ability to transform features not just shapes. More here: https://fluidcad.io/docs/guides/patterns You can see it in action in the lantern example: https://fluidcad.io/docs/tutorials/lantern
Comments
https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/4478#issuecomment-...
My pet use case is: "My naive approach as a programmer would be: `pen := new Pen(q,r,s,t); box := new Box( pen.L, pen.W, pen.H )`" along with being able to sometimes work with the whole pen, and sometimes touch the pen vs. the cap separately.
Since it's all javascript, it seems like there's a chance that this use case would work (ie: `p = Pen(...).render().getWidth()`)? Additionally, your intermediate step screenshots really makes it seem like a SketchUp-ish GUI would be perfect! Obviously a ton of work, but SketchUp's "grab face + extrude / push", but if it were "sticky" to the underlying parametric components seems like it'd be an awesome combo... something like group/components, but backed by code instead of GUI-only (or GUI-centric) editing.
This looks like it could do the same thing for constraint modeling. That's awesome!
Which operations are supported? (Booleans? ...)
Where's the API link?
...finally, was this vibe-coded?
Inquiring minds want to know!