I've spent quite a bit of time evaluating available free 3D systems for Linux, including Blender, ArtOfIllusion, BRL-CAD and SALOME. Here is my experience.
Blender is a great 3D modelling and animation tool. It supports many 3D formats, could export STL and has nice set of features. But it's not 3D CAD tool. It doesn't provide real CAD precision and support. Operations with solids are slow and unreliable. I did not produce very complex models, but Blender failed on operations with my solids very quickly, far before I could reach even slight level of complexity. ArtOfIllusion is similar to Blender in features. But has lot less functionality. It however provides little more CAD like control and supports solids little better. I could go little further on required operations with solids, yet it eventually failed too. BRL-CAD is powerful tool, designed to support solids only. Is it real 3D CAD. There is very limited support for typical shape objects used in tools like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor. Operations with solids are excellent and robust. However everything in you 3D CAD model has to be produced from solids and each solid stays in the model forever. At the end model looks like mathematical formula, which includes all intermediate solids and operations performed on them. Beside interface is basically command line. Which means it's powerful, but hard to work with. As you model grows it's hard to track dependencies, operations and intermediate objects you've used. "Model formula" also becomes big and hard to manage. Beside all that, there were couple more down points, which turned me away - slow and non flexible renderer and lack of support for common 3D formats. You cannot easily import 3D models from other programs into BRL-CAD. They are mostly not "proper" solids BRL-CAD could digest. The tool I end up with is SALOME. See caelinux.org. It is real 3D CAD as BRL-CAD. Compare to BRL-CAD, SALOME has advantages of quite advanced GUI, support for stl, iges and step formats, faster renderer and does not require drag on intermediate objects that much. SALOME has robust support for operations with solids, at the same time it support construction of solids from shapes (similar to usual SolidWorks approach). Set of CAD features is not as extensive as in commercial products, but quite good, with support of transformations, scaling, muli-directional transformations and as mentioned earlier full set of operations with solids. So far I'm quite happy with SALOME and could do all 3D CAD models I needed using it. I would recommend it to anybody looking for free 3D CAD working under Linux. On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 11:50 -0700, Kirk Wallace wrote: > On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 11:12 -0700, ulises barrera wrote: > > On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 > > Kirk Wallace wrote: > > > > > > >Is anyone using BRL-CAD to make parts? BRL-CAD appears to not make > > >g-code, is there something that can be used to make g-code from BRL-CAD? > > > > > > > Hi Kirk. > > > > I am using Freemill to postprocess STL format files exported > > from Blender, so if BRL-CAD can export to STL or another format > > supported by Freemill you can give it a try. Runs ok under Wine > > in ubuntu. > > > > www.mecsoft.com/Mec/Products/FreeMill.shtml > > > > Regards. > > > > Ulises > > It seems a little strange to use a 3D animation tool for CNC, but if it > works, what the heck. Do you have a procedure for creating > documentation? I'm not wild about using Wine, but I'm a Linux snob. I do > like the idea of separating the creation and processing of the 3D files. > It seems to be more flexible. Thanks for the information. I'll study > your leads (Blender, FreeMill) > > Kirk > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge > Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes > Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world > http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
