[jrflo]

Neat, but I don't really see the utility. The time consuming part of CAD drawing comes from figuring out the correct dimensions of each feature, spacing, sizing, tolerances, etc., and constraining the drawing in a way so that it's easy to tweak later on- which this doesn't do at all. Maybe you could draw a 2d sketch of what you want then generate it, but you'd still have to do the hard part.

[ololobus]

I think this is true under assumption that you know the CAD tool well. From my recent experience (I have a 3D printer), I regularly find myself in a situation where I know what I want to do, I can do measurements and I can make a sketch on a paper. Yet, making it a proper 3D model in something like FreeCAD is super tedious. I know OpenSCAD relatively well, but when it comes to something more complex I struggle a lot. The recent example, I was making a water tap for Lego duplo kitchen sink for my little one :)

So I would really appreciate a good AI/LLM tool that I can feed my sketch and parameters and it can save me hours of searching web and watching tutorials on how to extrude a circle over a curve

BTW, any existing AI tools work really well with OpenSCAD, so if you want a parametrized model that can be made out of simple shapes, I highly recommend this flow

[mk_stjames]

Your comment on how you feel trying to execute a model is similar to the inverse of how many Mechanical Engineers (used to) talk about coding - they know what they want, they can write down what they want a program to do, they just don't know what to type out in a programming language or how to compile the code or use the IDE, etc etc.

There are mechanical engineers out there who can literally model objects nearly as fast and they can 'think' about the layout of said object. If you look at the complexity of, say, a CAD model from a real, highly complex aluminum casting section of an automotive subframe, or the living-room-sized cross-fuselage spar forging of a fighter aircraft, with hundreds of ribs and fillets and features- and compare that to the simple model you are trying to make in OpenSCAD, you should quickly realize the parallels in difficulty you are trying to express (similar to the person without knowledge of C++ or Python watching someone be able to build applications by typing code from their fingertips as if they already knew what to type...)

You are struggling for a few reasons- 1., it is a knowledge hurdle of an entire field you are trying to surmount- again, go watch someone actually model a real, complex part and watch the speed, they can do so in a tool like Solidworks, CATIA, NX, etc... at a rate that is far different because they have experience that it can honestly take even good people years to accumulate - and 2. they are using professional tools - you mention OpenSCAD, like it is CAD, but it isn't. It is programmatic mesh generation, and it turns out that programmatically typing out how to generate complex things is much more difficult than a combination of a graphical GUI and graph-based generator that all big CAD programs figured out starting in the 1980s. If those tools you use were really the best way to make complex models 'paramaterized', then why do we design our fighter jets, Formula 1 cars, or Space X rockets in Dassault's CATIA or Siemen's NX ?

You want a LLM to take a sketch to your CAD, but what I'm saying is, there are people out there that can skip the sketch and build the CAD as fast as you can likely hand draw the first sketch, and these are skills you can actually learn, but you may just be using the wrong tools and have not had the practice necessary.

[8note]

as a mech who then did a cs degree, openscad is the brainfuck of cad

like its purposefully built to be unusable

[johnvanommen]

> So I would really appreciate a good AI/LLM tool that I can feed my sketch and parameters and it can save me hours of searching web and watching tutorials on how to extrude a circle over a curve

I think this is possible, but the ‘trick’ would be translating your instructions in English into some kind of language that the CAD software understands.

I’m on a bunch of 3D printing forums, and everyone tries to describe what the finished product would LOOK like. They end up making PICTURES when what they really want is a STL file.

Two dimensions are easier to visualize then three, so let’s put it this way:

If you wanted to turn “English” into “a 2D image that’s dimensionally accurate”, you’d want to translate from “English” to “SVG.”

SVG is dimensionally accurate. JPG isn’t. The file format itself has no concept of “dimensions” only “pixels.”

[gwbas1c]

I've resorted to using Rust + vcad, although I think I'll give OpenSCAD a spin.

I haven't tried telling AI to "make a thing," but I'm able to get Co-pilot to refactor code. It's just the geometry that makes my head spin.

[hadlock]

I've been having excellent success with prompts like "use cadquery and build x" for moderately simple stuff, like bearing clearance gauge for 3d prints. I don't like openscad because while it will technically produce .step , they don't import "clean" into fusion, etc the way step files produced by cadquery do

[andyfilms1]

If you use something like OnShape or Fusion, you could easily get comfortable enough to model those parts in about a day. Once get the hang of it, you'll be amazed how fast you can work.

It will take much longer than a day for AI to get to this level, so there's not much to lose by just learning how to use the software now :)

[smartmic]

As is often the case in the GenAI space, this also appears to be a solution to a non-existent problem.

[willis936]

I very much have this problem. I am uninterested in the art of sketching and constraining. I have spent many hours attempting and am content with the knowledge that I don't have the touch but still sometimes have problems I want to solve with 3D prints. LLMs could offer a solution, but they are bullshit machines and by their nature over promise. Drafting is not a trivial skill that we just wave a wand and magically have it automated. We'll get there eventually, but we're not there.

[andyfilms1]

A little suggestion in case you decide to try again, just don't worry about constraints. If you're making one-off parts for yourself, just sketch what you need and don't worry about trying to make it parametric. Get the part done and move on.

[willis936]

That's what I've done. It's just such a chore. I see what my ME counterparts can do in an hour and it takes me days. I could likely get myself to be a better MCAD designer with discipline, but there's little guarantee it would make me enjoy it. I enjoy ECAD and I'm good at it, so it will always be a fine hobby for me.

[8note]

MEs take at least a course in it, and its a great course to take. you could probably audit it

across MEs, its also the most fun couple classes of the degree, since they build a skill other tha math - visuallizing objects in 2d and 3d at the same time, and guessing whats on the back side of drawings.

it will also inprove your sketches on paper, so they

a different option would be that if you know what you want, but cant be bothered to draw it beyond a sketch, you might actually want a small mill instead of a 3d printer.

[stck]

If you can just take a pencil and draw a piece of furniture, press a button and get a semi-decent CAD drawing to tweak, that'd be a huge tool for carpenters and such.

[Arch-TK]

"to tweak" is probably quite far away even if "get a semi-decent CAD drawing" was remotely reliable which it isn't.

[VLM]

This is a classic outside the field vs inside the field conceptual disagreement.

From the outside, the hard part of designing a chair is making a blueprint. At least making a blueprint looks hard to people who've never made one. According to outsiders, the next layer of the onion is perhaps inserting reasonable constraint dimensions for similar reasons.

From the inside, as a guy who's recreationally made furniture, the hard part is judgment about joint selection and design, experience with wood warping (all wood changes shape with the seasons, a good woodworker makes it look easy to work around and a bad one makes expensive firewood that rapidly falls apart). Another insider PoV is judgment about wood selection to get the correct balance of final finish durability and appearance. Finally working toward outer layers of the onion, its time to do parametric joint design decisions... What's the ideal number and size of dovetail joints for, perhaps, a drawer.

I've seen prints of chairs before I don't need a LLM to make one similar to the ones I've seen before and could probably make from memory (at least ones I built myself), the library has loanable books and woodworking magazines. I do see the attraction from the outside.

Consider something like a Windsor chair. The larger the wedge in the spindles the tighter and longer lasting the chair until you break something trying to force them in; there's a lot of judgment and experience in designing, selecting, and installing spindles, but none of it is written down so it'll be hard to train a LLM... Tighten it until it breaks then don't tighten it that much next time. Most super detailed plans for Windsors are for inferior machine produced replicas which are not necessarily useful for a fine woodworker and are not exactly what craftsmen would aspire to. People who want "a cheap chair" will buy a 4-pak of folding chairs from walmart anyway, not make a homemade Windsor-style chair.

Another somewhat more blunt example is for actual woodworkers the "problem" with hand cut dovetails isn't knowing what they look like or how to make a diagram of one, but gaining the experience behind a hammer and chisel to push your luck while cutting them as far as possible without going too far and turning the part into scrap. One unavoidable part of woodworking is I've turned quite a bit of wood into scrap on the last step; oh well make another. At least I can burn scrap wood to keep warm LOL.

Its kind of like from outside the programming fraternity the non-programmers think the only skills required to program are typing real fast and being very experienced at fizzbuzz during interviews. But that doesn't work IRL, from an inside-out perspective.....

The woodworking world is not exactly lacking for a library of "semi-decent" plans. An automated system to make enormous quantities of low quality unverified and untested plans would not really help the field, no.

[KaiserPro]

Good question!

So why $work-1 spent so much time on this was quite logical. When you have point clouds generated from crappy head mounted cameras, you get models that are very complex.

for example, if you look at a point cloud of an Ikea LACK (https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/lack-nest-of-tables-set-of-2-wh...) It will be massively complex. this means that when you want to perform nay kind of interaction with it, its computationally difficult (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221064696/figure/fi...)

So an active area of research is point cloud to "CAD" model (ie simplyfied, where a LACK tabl would be ~40 triangles rather than 400k)

One of those ways is to say "oh this pointcloud looks like a table, lets generate a bunch of hypothesis tables and see if they fit." One way to do that is to have a model that understands parametric CAD, and can create a number of tables with parameters that can be adjusted until it fits.

A perhaps easier way is to take a point cloud, get an image model trained on CAD models to draw models, in 2d imagery, then use something like this to get an actual model out.

Its not efficient, but it might work.

There are also lots of other cases, like automatic plagiarism, which are less good.

[johnvanommen]

If you wanted to brute force it, it might be possible to have it generate a hundred outputs and then include a second pass to automatically select the generated model that most accurately resembles the expected output.

Basically leverage the randomness to create many variations, then select the most accurate variation automatically.

Terribly wasteful of time and processing power, but so is using GPU time to make pretty pictures randomly.

[whazor]

Strangely, it would work better if it generates CAD as code with clear labels. Then you can grab your caliper and make sure its all the right size.

[Karliss]

Even if you are completely skeptical about the AI cad model generation they also demonstrated their representation for model search/matching. Having a smarter search method for cad models based on 3d geometry in addition to traditional text search would be nice to have.

[CodeCompost]

Missing IKEA screws.

[timvdalen]

IKEA will send you those for free if you order them on the site, including free shipping

[nextlevelwizard]

If down the line this model could create 3D model from 2D images that would be very neat way to pay less for war gaming models

[satvikpendem]

Gaussian splats and neural radiance fields already exist.

[nextlevelwizard]

I dont know how that solves this. How do you get STLs out of gausian splats?

[whywhywhywhy]

Not splats as such but text to polygon model and image to polygon model exist and for the use case of figurines that's fine to convert to formats for 3D printers.

[semi-extrinsic]

You can already do this with apps like Kira. I believe it is especially good on the iPhone variants with LiDAR.

[nextlevelwizard]

I dont know that app specifically, but from all videos of different lidar and other 3d scanning tools I have seen the results are pretty bad and require a lot of sculpting after the scan. Whole point was that with few images the ML model could construct the actual 3d model for you

[protocolture]

Already done. Cults generally has stls of 40k models before release. Its just a matter of finding them.

[nextlevelwizard]

doesnt really help if I cant find them and I guess if I could find them so could GW and they would be taken down. Having an application you can host at home that could do the job from pictures would be awesome

[protocolture]

Cults used to be really good at avoiding this stuff, but Scrungaloids, which is just a parody of 40k that apes some rogue trader aesthetics got nuked within 48 hours of going live on cults so the dream seems to be dead.