Hello Alexander,
I’ve been using BRL-CAD now for 19 years and can tell you that it is very good
at some things and very poor at other things. One thing it does not do very
well it continuous curved surfaces. I usually build those in something more
parametric like solidworks, save them as an STL file, and then import to
BRL-CAD. So if you are looking to model the body panels of a Lamborghini
Veyron, BRL-CAD is not your tool.
That said, everything in the GUI can be done from the command line, however I
found using a combination of command and mouse is the most efficient. The
easiest way to start is by typing a ? at the command line and pressing enter.
This provides a list of all the commands that are available. Some have obvious
names while others you just learn by doing. There were some tutorials in the
past when the GUI was not as robust as it is now that I used to learn to build
individual solids that may still exist somewhere.
Solid editing is a fairly simple thing. The sed command will put you in solid
edit mode from the command window. Add the solid name as an argument and you
can begin editing. If no argument is used, you must use the mouse to scroll
through all the solids in that are currently in view. If the pointer is at the
very bottom of the graphics window it will select the first solid that was
brought up, if at the top of the window it will select the last solid.
Everything in between can be selected in the order that they were brought into
view. Select the desired solid using the center mouse button. This is tedious
if there are a lot of things on the screen, and if a particular solid appears
more than once you will get a “multiply referenced” error when using sed which
forces the use of the mouse to select the solid.
Once a solid is selected, you can expand the menu on the left side of the
screen If you see no window, press F7 to toggle it on. Each of the options in
this menu can be selected at the command line using the Press command followed
by the full menu option name. If there are spaces you will need quotes around
the name. I prefer to just grab the mouse and click the option and then come
back to the command window to enter the values. For example, if I wanted to
change radius A of a sphere to 1 inch, after selecting the sphere to edit, I
would select with the mouse “Edit A” from the menu and the come back and type
“p 1”. Really the only time I use the Press command is to press the accept
button to accept any changes I made or if I am doing some scripting. BRL-CAD
allows commands to be placed in a text file and then be sourced in using the
source command. This sometimes requires the selection of a menu option where
“Press” becomes important.
I hope I didn’t overload you, and you can certainly ask questions if you get
stuck. May I ask what you intend to use BRL-CAD for? Another option that may
be easy to learn, although requiring more mouse use than keyboard is google
sketchup. There’s a free version that I used to model my entire house and it
was perfect for that.
Enjoy!
Robet Anderson
From: Alexander Wallace [mailto:alexander.o.wall...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2016 7:19 PM
To: brlcad-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [brlcad-users] Hello and Mged command-line vs GUI.
Hello All,
Hope you're doing great.
I've been recently trying to choose an opensource CAD software to pick an learn
sort of deeply (as much as required) and I'm a big fan of they keyboard more
than the mouse.
BRL-CAD definitely looks powerful to do what I need and a lot more, but have a
few questions, perhaps a little bit of concern.
I've been going through the tutorials and at some point they start combining
the use of the GUI with the command line in a way that makes me wonder if the
command line lacks means to do things that are done in the GUI, I then have to
spend a good amount of time to find out the commands to do what is being shown
with the GUI and it is sometimes hard to find.
For example, entering Edit Mode for a Shape. I spend maybe an hour and found
the equivalent (sed) by almost pure chance.
I would like to do most if not all the editing using the command line in MGED
but I'm finding it very hard to find examples/documentation on how to use
commands not covered in the tutorials.
For instance, can someone point me to a doc, or help me understand how to do a
full Edit cycle with sed? I mean, once I type sed and the shape's name, how to
use the commands (like translate, scale, etc) to modify the desired attributes
and then apply the changes?
The biggest concern right now: Will I be able to find documentation, examples,
help, for BRL-CAD? I am almost certain it has all the power I could ever want,
but will I be able to figure out what I need? I can certainly look at the code
but it will take me ages that way probably.
Thanks to all for keeping such a great project alive. I hope I can find the
answers I need as I would very much lie to embrace it.
Thanks!
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