[freearchitecture] Re: x3d-cad vs. step

Lars Grobe grobe at gmx.net
Mon May 8 13:44:54 BST 2006


Hi!

> For anyone interested, the BRL-CAD project has been in the process of  
> creating an open source STEP interchange library (in C with support  
> for AP 203 and AP 214 for starters) in conjunction with previous  
> efforts from folks at NIST.  It's priority is mainly driven by  
> community interest, however, so if nobody contributes then the  
> development of that particular feature stagnates as has been the case  
> over the past several months.  I'd be glad to share the progress to  
> date with anyone interested in picking up or contributing to the  
> effort.  I can be reached via e-mail or on IRC in #brlcad on the  
> Freenode network as brlcad.

Well, the creation of that library is good news. Does the step licensing
allow other apps to link to that library without paying the license fee for
the parts of step implemented? I think it is hardly possible to convince
authors of independent open source tools to pay for their free work, but if
they could link against a library, this might be the approach to encourage.

I digged a bit in the x3d environment (well, that is already to much said,
in fact my information consists mainly of one email). The x3d-cad
development seams to mainly target export from cad to other tools at the
moment. There is no big development going on to create a full cad-format in
cad as far as I understood. That is really sad to hear, as I would like to
have a x3d-based format (just imagine that you could use every x3d-browser
plugin to present models with all the nice 3d-support available for x3d/vrml
etc). So using x3d might mean that the further development to a full cad
format had yet to be done.

Another question, as there is a BRL-CAD developer on board - I wonder if it
was possible to plug-in an application like BRL-CAD into another. The reason
I ask is that, while BRL-CAD is said to be a very strong solid modeler, it
has not much in common with other tools an architect is used too. So in my
opinion one promising way to go would be to use BRL-CAD for solid
operations, but from another GUI, together with other tools (Blender for
meshes, Pythoncad for 2d-drawings, Scribus for layout, ...). So it would be
necessary to use the engines of these applications on a shared model and
from an more or less independently developed GUI. Is this just a naive idea?

CU, Lars.


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