Slashdot Mirror
FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software?
Paul server guy writes "I work at a privately funded, open source, manned, return to the moon mission — Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon. Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too. What we are looking for is CAD software that we can feed into Blender (or the like) to do 3D modeling with. Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender and Art of Illusion, but have not been pleased. They want to just draw the parts, then feed them to the art people who will run them through the 3D modelers for videos, illustrations and such. What is your preference?"
It looks like that campaign was supposed to end last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste time answering your questions now, given the seemingly unrealistic goal, when you can't even format a donation box? Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?
BRL-CAD is probably the only full fledged package. Link:
http://brlcad.org/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too."
Ideology won't get you to the moon.
FreeCAD https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page has made huge progress recently.
Everyone is going to be like "that's no moon" if you use open source graphics programs to plan your flight. But Gimp has a "sparks" brush for the stars.
... for planning another moon hoax. We all know they didn't go to the moon but filmed it back in Nevada, and they did it all without any flimsy-schimzy 3d effects.
I actually do a lot of work with Blender, and it can import a wide variety of formats. I would be very surprised it the CAD programs you are using don't export to at least ONE of the various formats Blender can accept. If you are using AutoCAD I think you have a good shot of an export to a ,dxf or .dwg are probably your best bets.
Put a Stallman on the moon, Im shure you will get funding
"Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon"
No you're not.
Sure, it looks like he's plugging his website, but is it really necessary to point that out? I think we all can read. Maybe instead of boosting your own ego by putting him down, you could actually do something constructive in the minute it took you to reply to his post. In terms of free CAD software, BRL-CAD is probably the closest to what you're looking for, but I've always found it tiresome to use. It was developed by the Army for their computer modeling needs in the late 70s. It's still a fairly active project as well.
HeeksCad is making progress. I don't know about feeding your parts into Blender, though. You may be able to shape the project some if you get involved, though. Somebody else mentioned FreeCAD. I've not yet tried to use it.
There's also gcad3d. I found that one to be tough to use, though. For 2D, I don't think that you have many options but qcad.
Unless you're not *really* sending a person to the moon, you're just faking a lunar landing :-)
Being able to import CAD files into Blender should be the least of your concerns when choosing a CAD package. There isn't a free CAD package out there that will cope with designing a rocket and lunar lander. Spend your hard earned $130 (plus a lot more) on a high-end CAD package like Catia or Unigraphics.
A Couple of others have already mentioned it, but take a look at BRL-CAD.
It's pretty much the standard. It originated as a US Government backed project and was later open sourced. This is a VERY mature piece of software, unfortunately with a steep learning curve.
Red
In addition to the comments here, you might find useful suggestions in this 2005 and this 2003 Slashdot discussion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
no probably Carl Bass
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
Do you really have to ask this question, isn't it obvious?
He answered already: they want to put a man on a moon and a woman.
It's a ploy for the man to get the woman. Obviously he figured that the only way to do so is to get her to the moon and basically eliminate the entire world from competing.
Also, he probably will limit her life support supplies, such as air, and she will only find out about it there and will be forced to beg him for this stuff. You'd think under the circumstances he is bound to get her finally.
You can't handle the truth.
Is this a joke? Your team page shows you have at most four engineers, who are mostly IT geeks, not experts in propulsion, aerospace structures or astrodynamics, with the possible exception of Dr Snyder. You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote. You guys make Armadillo Aerospace look like Lockheed Martin. At least SpaceX etc. while lacking other things, started with something (usually money), you guys don't have anything. Quit wasting your time.
oh man, what a load - if you had real engineers working on actual moon project you'd be more worried about nonlinear FEA software at this point. There's a reason why the USA is the only nation to ever had put humans on the moon - it's way too complex, way too expensive, and requires way too many PhD level man-decade equivalents of effort.
Doesn't work, and I speak from experience. I have done work for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) doing similar things and what you are looking for doesn't exist on all sorts of levels.
First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.
It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?
It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.
If you are seriously attempting to design aerospace hardware then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless. Suck it up and act like it. If, however, you are actually trying to become a proof-of-concept for FOSS in engineering work then I wish you the best of luck. However, those are two different goals and likely not compatible.
However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.
The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper once animated. It takes almost more work to clean up a CAD model for animation that it takes to create one from scratch.
You can't really even send a CAD design right to a 3D printer without a significant amount of clean-up unless it was designed with that in mind.
So, to summarize, decide what you want each section of your operation to do and shell out the cash for whatever it takes to let them do it properly. Let everyone worry about their own needs and don't try and meddle by forcing the internal needs of other departments on them. If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.
I'd be quite scared to be launched on the Moon by a company that asked suggestions about the tools to use on Slashdot!
They're worrying about CAD when they should be worrying about calculations and broad, system-level design. Remember, the first moon missions took place without the use of CAD. Detail designing the parts is a relatively small part of aerospace engineering. A better approach would be to prove their engineering legitimacy by analysis, then impress IBM/Dassault enough to donate a CATIA license to them. Give the rough launch vehicle design, the mission orbit design, the reentry vehicle type, and detailed quantified justifications and tradeoff studies for everything. It should be heavy with physics, and the calculations should be airtight. Expect a 500+ page technical report for this scale of project at this preliminary stage. Any explanatory sketches can be done by hand or any illustration program. You only need CAD when you're (1) ready to machine parts or (2) ready for detailed computational analysis. These guys are jumping the gun.
CAD isn't just about coming up with the part geometry by the way. Modern CAD/PLM involves massive amounts of metadata about materials, dimensions/tolerances (all locked in proprietary file formats), and keeping track of the relationships between parts, sub-assemblies and assemblies. You don't want to manually copy & paste 300 fasteners each time you recalculate stresses on a rocket nozzle, do you? It also automates many tedious design efforts. Want to figure out how to snake twenty miles of wiring, hydraulics and other tubing through a rocket with a hundred thousand parts? Oh also, each type of cable/tubing has a different minimum bend radius because of material stresses. Arc it too tightly and it cracks open during the launch vibrations, after having fatigued due to ambient thermal variations. And these are just a couple mechanical aspects of such a sprawling project that CAD must handle. You could "draw" the parts of just about any modern machine (fighter jet, car, bicycle) with an old copy of Maya used for the CGI in Jurassic Park. It'd be useless for analysis though because of the low numerical precision, and impossible for engineering because they have the most primitive handling of parametric modeling, and crude ability to work with multi-component (thousands) geometry.
Any teenager can come up with some gee-whiz 3d animation (that Mars lander animation from years ago was done by one). Could any teenager get funding for a mission to the moon? Work on your numbers first, then worry about software, you IT geeks you.
If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.
If one could do a shot similar to Apollo, but unmanned, several metric tons could be returned, and be quite profitable.
Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.
The parent has given you the answer you don't want, but it is nonetheless the correct one. There are several intellicad based products which are fairly mature (BricsCAD, for example) which are also interoperable with commercial software to an extent. Still, they're even more limited than the commercial products - both in capability and in productivity.
It's been 10 years since I was in aerospace (NASA and Orbital Sciences, FWIW), but the big push at the time was Pro/Engineer. They were, back in the late 90s, where AutoCAD is today. The learning curve was difficult and the software expensive - but it was damned impressive, and it got the job done on several complex geometry products.
It sounds like you're not going to the moon, but rather are exploring funding options and sources for a startup who's ultimate goal is intended to be a moon landing. If you were going to the moon, I would suggest you start looking at FEM and CFD modeling software for the structures (my area of expertise), and the myriad custom software bits for each of the critical components. I believe NASTRAN is open source, though I'm not aware of a GUI front end (which you will dearly want). FLAGRO (Also a NASA project) should be open source for fracture mechanics analysis, but it was really in its infancy when I left NASA.
This will sound funny, but you might want to go check with the amateur rocket guys to see what they're using. RockSIM is the gold standard for 6DOF simulations for rockets traveling up to the edge of space, if you're on a budget, but it's not open source. There is an OSS project very similar to RockSIM - I think it's called RASaero.
There has been a lot of money invested in creating tools for much of what you want to do - you'll be better served in the long run to leverage the closed source options, focusing on keeping _your_ IP free for anyone to use - if that's your intent. You can always give away your CADD - and most packages have output/converters to fully defined - of not OSS - formats.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
While I can't see the linked page, the summary contains no mention of either bringing them back, or having them survive the trip.
That makes it a little easier (though still very expensive).
Actually, that's probably the easiest bit. The European Space Agency funded a couple of open source CPU designs, so you can get rad-hardened open source SPARC32 CPUs quite easily. They will quite happily run *BSD or older versions of Solaris. Maybe even Linux if the painfully broken MMU handling on SPARC32 has been fixed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They tried, but they couldn't find an open sourced pen ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Here's a free CAD package that seems to be just the right caliber for your organization...Google SketchUp.
There are several CAD apps out there. It will eventually come down to trying them and personal preference.
Personal preference, huh? Interesting that you leave out the "Correct enough to design a piece of vehicular hardware that doesn't fucking explode halfway out of Earth's atmosphere" criterion. The idea of using software which is untested and unvetted for this purpose borders on criminal.
If I were riding a spacecraft to the moon (or riding any vehicle that could easily kill me), I'd want it designed with the best tools for getting the job done. If that's a closed source tool, buy the closed source tool.
Nope, Wishing I hadn't posted the website at all, I'm just looking for some software to let the Engineers share data with the Artists, Not stir up this hornets nest.
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.
That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.
For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)
For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.
As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.
You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.
At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.
I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.
If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.
The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.
Good luck with your grand dream.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Have you seen the list of Open Engineering Tools over at DevelopSpace (http://wiki.developspace.net/Open_Source_Engineering_Tools)? Not sure if it helps with the immediate need, but it is the most comprehensive list of open source tools for all things engineering I have found.
"To hasten the advancement of humanity into a spacefaring civilization..." -- http://www.mach30.org
So, anybody help you find anything yet?
I only know of BRL-CAD that would be suitable for defining geometry that you could actually fabricate (as opposed to geometry for pretty pictures).
http://brlcad.org/
It has hit /. before http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/08/1823248
Dentists need to grow some balls and use hand tools only.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I lived with Windows my entire life until I left college, and embraced the FOSS community. Taught myself Linux. Taught myself a lot of things over the years.
I honestly would bleed for the concept of FOSS. To me, it's like handing the first man to own a model T his own torque wrench- totally freeing him to do something
he's never done before, with something he'll be experiencing for the first time.
But I'm sorry, FOSS CAD & Parametric CAD is total crap now, both from a usability and functionality standpoint. It's the one area that FOSS, I feel,
will never fill well. Why? 2 simple reasons:
1. User Interface- FOSS community, are you listening? Stop with all the damn menus. Learn how to make a decent GUI layer for some aspects of your
program. Even engineers are human- they need something to not only be easy to learn, but INTUITIVE. I'm not sugguesting it look like Fischer Price designed the
layout- just speak with a symbologist/iconographer. Seriously. Ask what your users do, and create usable icons and common actions.
Get over all your sanctimonious insistence on coding a program for numeric and input style- make even a single program with a decent GUI interface. Don't think I'm
calling out Linux people specifically- I use Autodesk Inventor 2010. Yes, legally. I learn it at a community college, and the new version is guilty of that too- older versions
had a more intuitive GUI. The new version takes a LOT of getting used to.
2. GOOD 3D support and rendering-
With all I've seen the FOSS community capable of in graphic rendering (blender, gimp, etc.), why do we lag so far behind in 3D processing? Gaming support famously
suffers massively, and along with it, decent parametric modeling in real time. I have yet to find any native FOSS CAD program, for any OS, that actually renders in 3D
well, or mostly, at all. This is something harder to fix. If the FOSS community could pool their resources to one massive program, like Shuttleworth did for Ubuntu, we
might have a chance. It's a Herculean task, and one I've seen FOSS struggle with for years.
I use Inventor now because it works (with a TERRIBLE interface in 2010), but in 3D mode, extrusion modeling/building makes part design like sculpting clay, one I understand
the commands. It's another ballgame entirely. I *WISH* I could do that with a FOSS program- bad GUI or no!
Inventor also has full kinematic modeling, for testing motion of interacting parts, and integrated stress analysis. Considering NASTRAN is coded in FORTRAN, if I remember
right, even stress analysis software is pretty proprietary, and noone has updated that on a massive scale since the 1960s! We're talking software initially developed for NASA,
and hasn't been re-coded in almost 50 YEARS. Fifty. If NASA can't fund it, who the hell can? (insert jokes about Richard Branson here)
3D CAD and such specialized software in FOSS has a long way to go. I hope I'm wrong. I have yet to see even one that was usable for extrusion style modeling, which almost
anyone can pick up easily once they know how to navigate the interface. Last FOSS CAD program I tried was Q-CAD- among many others like it, did no 3D, no extrusions,
and was a very poor UI. Did 2D well, but it, and many other small CAD programs in native Linux did the same thing. Hell, the only FOSS CAD I've ever seen that COULD do 3D
was by EmachineShop.com, and for free software, the rendering was decent- but the GUI is overly simple, only icons, very limited in modeling scope, and constantly had issues
with basic lines joining together.
I'm sure flames await me- as I am a basic, and probably average Linux user with almost no coding skills, but I have much experience hands-on with this style of software in /. daily, for 10 years, and has tried every program I could find in this area, I hope I'm wrong. I really do.
Windows AND Linux. And you know what, for a guy like me that reads
I hope I've only scratched the surface- but everything I've seen till now pales in comparison to Inventor. And with a UI as bad as it, that's pretty bad.
If the man and women they intend to put on the moon need not to be "living and breathing" (i.e. if they're aiming at "Moon burials") it would save tremendous amounts of payload in Life-Support, plus Landing & Return vehicle.
Actually, now that I think about it, the market for Moon burials could probably lower the barrier to entry for a startup aiming at actually sending living and breathing humans to the Moon and back - how many people out there would be willing to pay, sau $200.000 to be buried on the Moon!???
Don't get me wrong, Inventor is a pretty decent software package. We used it for quite a while in our SAE Baja team and I believe they are still using it, mostly due to a reluctance to move to UGS NX. However it IS a lowend package compared to some more capable software like UGS NX or CATIA.
One of the largest benefits of working in a software like NX for example is being able to move ideas from the Design to Engineering to Manufacturing phases all in one software package.
Ok, I'm gonna feed the Troll on this one...
>But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never >effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.
I thought that was just what Russia and the US did in the 50's and 60's. Granted they had the budgets of their whole countries to wager on it, but that doesn't hold water as an argument either for many reasons. I'll propose one - it may be hard, but not so fantastic to think that a project like this could be done in 2010 for a couple of orders of magnitude less dollars than in 1960. If it can't then maybe we haven't learned anything from history and we are all doomed. I hope not. I could say something about "shoulders of giants" now but I think that was already somewhere on the openluna.org website.
I'm sorry you are so jaded by your open source volunteer work that you have lost all ability to dream big. Go back to your cube now and do whatever it is you do. Let the dreamers dream big, you sir are apparently not suited to it.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican