Interestingly, ttouch created browser-based CAD tool CADmium a few years ago based on Truck. Then, a few months ago, they created another one (CADara) based on OpenCASCADE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070083.
Truck seems cool, but creating a b-rep kernel is a phenomenal amount of work. Given that, I'm curious how quickly SolidCraft will mature.
> Creating a b-rep kernel is a phenomenal amount of work
Well, I did it, took 6 months, and I think I'm ahead of Truck on that front since as far as I can tell Truck can still only do single edge fillets with Newton's method as their new fillet algorithm, whereas my kernel can do planar fillet chains fairly reliably.
I wish someone would wrap a frontend around it too considering I'm bad at designing UIs, and the architecture is too weird to put a conventional 3D CAD UI on it that I'm honestly hoping someone would throw their LLM at that task.
Also, sorry about the excessive self-promotion, but I think most people would be shouting from the mountaintop if they built a BREP geometry kernel from scratch solo too.
“ Dangerous operations which may generate degenerate/sliver/zero-dimension geometries are instead blocked from materializing to 3D at a compiler level.”
How is that achieved, or rather what does that mean? What defines a sliver?
A sliver is basically a tiny degenerate geometry in the micro/nanometer scale that's basically the result of ambiguous surface intersections. Basically, if you put two say, cylindrical surfaces against each other in NURBS form, floating point noise would generate these microscopic geometric noises, and a lot of what commercial kernel does is they use what they call "healing" operations to clean up those bad microscopic geometries from the models they generate.
Aetheris took a very obvious approach that not many have seemed to tried before: It throws an error when an operation that may create ambiguous intersections and refuses to materialize bad geometry in the first place, which is not really possible to do with traditional NURBS based kernels, whereas Aetheris can because it is analytical first.
If the experiment does work out and the library NVIDIA open-sourced proves to be mathematically robust enough for standalone CAD use, it would leapfrog OpenCASCADE kernel for open-source CAD (solved math that was previously propriety, graceful failures without crashes, multiple CPU threads, running smoothly on web browsers).
FWIW I don't think it makes sense to copy anyone's CAD program, and I am negatively disposed to the ArtCraft thing as a general position. I think it's fully the wrong approach.
But I am here for LLMs, if they really can be used to solve maths, to solve CAD maths, which is, as you say, the really difficult stuff.
I am still not going to use an early-stage CAD package, but this actually would be a meaningful contribution to society. The rest is a bit AI NIH.
People don’t get the super high value proposition in having these all *Craft packages controlled (automated) by AI. Most of the companies who are the kingmakers in the given area, do not allow it easily or are hard to integrate (costly) with, or did allow back in time and don’t now.
Given much can be automated in 2026, these (promoted goodies) may come as the missing link in innumerable automation chains, and particularly where commercial agents aim for when they sell costly licensing.
It also indirectly fights piracy and the risks which come with pirated copies (sidelined with funny stuff).
I played around with Freecad mcp, and then also with having an agent generate some openscad before.
For the Freecad mcp I didn't like it at all. The agent didn't work in a way that would let me easily modify things. I hadn't given it instructions, but it didn't really create sketches and then extrude them (after checking they're all fully parameterized.)
For openscad the problem was just that while the model could do it, the lack of "visual reasoning" (for want of a better word) really held it back. There was a nice workflow there though by giving it a little "generate_image" of part tool and it could make a nice iterative loop.
Overall for both approaches it was slower than if I'd done it myself (and I'm not particularly good at 3d modelling). Now, that's not that surprising given that I was trying something new, but without being able to edit things generated by the AI myself I wouldn't want to try it again.
Now, maybe this solution can work in the way I'd want to. I may give this a go next time I have something I want to make.
Very interesting. Looking at the images I'm not sure if this is based on Autodesk Inventor (plausible since they already imitated AutoCAD), or in Solid Edge (given the name).
Looks like this uses the Truck modeling kernel: https://github.com/ricosjp/truck
Interestingly, ttouch created browser-based CAD tool CADmium a few years ago based on Truck. Then, a few months ago, they created another one (CADara) based on OpenCASCADE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070083.
Truck seems cool, but creating a b-rep kernel is a phenomenal amount of work. Given that, I'm curious how quickly SolidCraft will mature.
> Creating a b-rep kernel is a phenomenal amount of work
Well, I did it, took 6 months, and I think I'm ahead of Truck on that front since as far as I can tell Truck can still only do single edge fillets with Newton's method as their new fillet algorithm, whereas my kernel can do planar fillet chains fairly reliably.
I wish someone would wrap a frontend around it too considering I'm bad at designing UIs, and the architecture is too weird to put a conventional 3D CAD UI on it that I'm honestly hoping someone would throw their LLM at that task.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Aetheris/
Also, sorry about the excessive self-promotion, but I think most people would be shouting from the mountaintop if they built a BREP geometry kernel from scratch solo too.
Fascinating repo, thank you for making it!
I’m curious, what does this part mean?
“ Dangerous operations which may generate degenerate/sliver/zero-dimension geometries are instead blocked from materializing to 3D at a compiler level.”
How is that achieved, or rather what does that mean? What defines a sliver?
A sliver is basically a tiny degenerate geometry in the micro/nanometer scale that's basically the result of ambiguous surface intersections. Basically, if you put two say, cylindrical surfaces against each other in NURBS form, floating point noise would generate these microscopic geometric noises, and a lot of what commercial kernel does is they use what they call "healing" operations to clean up those bad microscopic geometries from the models they generate.
Aetheris took a very obvious approach that not many have seemed to tried before: It throws an error when an operation that may create ambiguous intersections and refuses to materialize bad geometry in the first place, which is not really possible to do with traditional NURBS based kernels, whereas Aetheris can because it is analytical first.
They are working on a Rust port for the SMLib geometric kernel subset that NVIDIA open-sourced yesterday as part of their new USD BRep library:
https://github.com/bherbruck/solidcore
If the experiment does work out and the library NVIDIA open-sourced proves to be mathematically robust enough for standalone CAD use, it would leapfrog OpenCASCADE kernel for open-source CAD (solved math that was previously propriety, graceful failures without crashes, multiple CPU threads, running smoothly on web browsers).
FWIW I don't think it makes sense to copy anyone's CAD program, and I am negatively disposed to the ArtCraft thing as a general position. I think it's fully the wrong approach.
But I am here for LLMs, if they really can be used to solve maths, to solve CAD maths, which is, as you say, the really difficult stuff.
I am still not going to use an early-stage CAD package, but this actually would be a meaningful contribution to society. The rest is a bit AI NIH.
People don’t get the super high value proposition in having these all *Craft packages controlled (automated) by AI. Most of the companies who are the kingmakers in the given area, do not allow it easily or are hard to integrate (costly) with, or did allow back in time and don’t now.
Given much can be automated in 2026, these (promoted goodies) may come as the missing link in innumerable automation chains, and particularly where commercial agents aim for when they sell costly licensing.
It also indirectly fights piracy and the risks which come with pirated copies (sidelined with funny stuff).
Oh my God you are right.
Interested to try this out.
I played around with Freecad mcp, and then also with having an agent generate some openscad before.
For the Freecad mcp I didn't like it at all. The agent didn't work in a way that would let me easily modify things. I hadn't given it instructions, but it didn't really create sketches and then extrude them (after checking they're all fully parameterized.)
For openscad the problem was just that while the model could do it, the lack of "visual reasoning" (for want of a better word) really held it back. There was a nice workflow there though by giving it a little "generate_image" of part tool and it could make a nice iterative loop.
Overall for both approaches it was slower than if I'd done it myself (and I'm not particularly good at 3d modelling). Now, that's not that surprising given that I was trying something new, but without being able to edit things generated by the AI myself I wouldn't want to try it again.
Now, maybe this solution can work in the way I'd want to. I may give this a go next time I have something I want to make.
Interesting product and will try this.
Could you please confirm if 3D printing functionality is supported? This feature would be very useful for professionals. Thank you.
I think having these abundance of alternatives is positive, overall. We need a way to find good ones.
Very interesting. Looking at the images I'm not sure if this is based on Autodesk Inventor (plausible since they already imitated AutoCAD), or in Solid Edge (given the name).
It looks a lot like Fusion, where Autodesk took all the passable UI and UX from Inventor and replaced it with absolute garbage.
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