Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace) (solvespace.com)
204 points by phkahler 6 hours ago
MrDOS 5 hours ago
SolveSpace is a wonderfully different take on parametric CAD, but development has really slowed, and it seems fundamentally incapable of some pretty rudimentary features (like chamfers[0]). Dune 3D[1] seems like a pretty effective spiritual successor.
phkahler 4 hours ago
Chamfers and Fillets are my next major undertaking. Don't expect them any time soon, but they've moved to the top of my list. They are extremely difficult to do in the general case - so we will not cover all cases. Several years ago I tried an experiment:
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/453#issuecom...
That could only do the top or bottom of a straight extrusion. This time will be a more general than that. Not looking forward to doing corners where 3 fillets meet ;-)
MrDOS 3 hours ago
Oh, sorry, I didn't recognize that this had been posted by a SolveSpace maintainer! Rad. I am glad to hear the project is still moving.
I also appreciate the difficulty of generalizing chamfers/fillets. There's a reason that basically all FOSS CAD packages have struggled with it.
echelon 2 hours ago
julbaxter 5 hours ago
Dune3D uses SolveSpace behind the scene.
phkahler 4 hours ago
Only for the constraint solver. Dune uses OCCT for the solid model.
amelius 4 hours ago
brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago
How does Dune3D compare to FreeCAD?
phkahler 13 minutes ago
>> How does Dune3D compare to FreeCAD?
Dune3D is more like Solvespace with a few improvements and bug fixes vs being anywhere near FreeCAD in terms of capability. Improvements include using STEP files in assemblies and having some ability to make Fillets or Chamfers. Bugs fixes would be due to using OCCT for NURBS surfaces - solvespace frequently fails with NURBS boolean operations.
As for overall capability, FreeCAD does everything these others do but also supports lofting and other modeling options, BIM for architecture, I think it does pre- and post- processing for FEA, and maybe some other "big tool" things.
IshKebab 4 hours ago
FreeCAD doesn't have the limitations of SolveSpace, and the UX is actually decent now. I moved to that.
jonpurdy an hour ago
I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets.
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
jabl 2 hours ago
Some years ago I tried to learn CAD by doing some FreeCAD tutorials, and failed. But I hear 1.0 was a big step forward, and the recently released 1.1 is also a big step, and it should be somewhat decent nowadays. Maybe I need to try again one day.
l-albertovich 4 hours ago
I just tested it out of curiosity and found that viewport manipulation behaves in a very similar way to onshape which feels very natural to me.
I've been thinking about trying to implement this in freecad but I'm still exploring the idea.
Karliss an hour ago
faangguyindia 3 hours ago
All we need is a genius, with unlimited claude and codex credit and he will replace Fusion 360 atleast in 3d printing and machining space
It's so sad most guys aren't comming together to build some great CAD engine which open source really needs!
Gimp is shame, photoshop is increasingly being lockdown and people who have smarts to fix that are doing nothing.
ezst 3 hours ago
That people on this forum convinced themselves that it's a reasonable take to vibe code a useful geometric kernel is profoundly depressing.
progbits 4 minutes ago
faangguyindia 2 hours ago
stackedinserter 2 hours ago
masonhensley 5 hours ago
I've been using FreeCad more and more, but solvespace has been a great, lightweight tool to design parts for laser cutting by SendCutSend/Oshcut.
Neat that they got it working in the browser.
bhouston 5 hours ago
FreeCAD is amazing these days. It has completely replaced my use of Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking projects. It is capable and the UI is understandable. Its feature depth is incredible.
FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives.
I find the rendering side of things under developed though.
hrmtst93837 26 minutes ago
FreeCAD strains on larger assemblies and tighter parametric constraints, and feature depth doesn't hide slow updates or sketch import glitches.
ur-whale 4 hours ago
> FreeCAD is amazing these days.
FreeCAD has become much better, no denying it.
"Amazing" is however not the word I would use though, the UI is still very convoluted and very hard to learn.
The worst part in FreeCAD, and which remains true to this day is the load of minutia you need to know to handle/avoid weird corner cases that you inevitable run into when you start building complex models and where FreeCAD stubbornly refuses to let you carry on with your work.
When you paint yourself into one of these corners, the software is hugely unhelpful when it comes to understanding what you did wrong and how to correct it.
In short, the word "Amazing" only works if you compare it to the absolute abomination the UI was a few years back.
But compare FreeCAD today to, for example, how slick Fusion is, there is still a very, very wide gap.
Finally, the geometry engine, is a somewhat old and creaky thing that sometimes downright fails to compute fillets or surface/surface intersections correctly, so yeah, YMMV.
FreeCAD is however, free software, and not controlled by one of the worst corp. in the world of software: Autodesk. So huge thumbs up there.
trey-jones 3 hours ago
blacklion 2 hours ago
jstanley 4 hours ago
lopsotronic 4 hours ago
Yeah anything involving 2d art I confess I just send to Blender, even technical illustration, with the exception of O&D style sheets.
The fact anyone got a CAD kernel working in the browser is insane. Parsing the vagaries, vendor cruft, and gaping holes in STEP files has occupied a non-trivial amount of my career.
You want to talk about poisoned specs . . .
3yr-i-frew-up 3 hours ago
Yep, love FreeCAD.
I did a major project with it in 2019 and it was great back then.
The issues it has are pretty minor. Admittedly I ended up using a fork for Assembly3(IIRC)
henrebotha 28 minutes ago
So stoked to see the movement on this project. Once lofts are possible, it'll be so over for FreeCAD
jLaForest 21 minutes ago
Chambers aren't available so I wouldn't hold you breath waiting for lofts
4gotunameagain 4 minutes ago
Just curious, why are you so excited for the demise of FreeCAD ?
Has worked quite okay for me thus far for semi professional & hobby projects
GorbachevyChase an hour ago
I’ve wondered how feasible it would be to start building browser-based CAD/design products to replace our expensive and poorly supported paid plugins and niche products. Seems promising!
ecto 2 hours ago
Here's my take on CAD in the browser! https://vcad.io
I implemented a full kernel in rust and compile it to wasm https://github.com/ecto/vcad
marshray an hour ago
> Could not locate file: "https://huggingface.co/campedersen/cad0-mini/resolve/main/on..."
latand6 2 hours ago
So I can ask an LLM to write rust code to generate CAD designs???
phkahler 2 hours ago
Does that handle NURBS? It says STEP import, but not export?
JoshTriplett 4 hours ago
Impressive work!
Minor nit: why does the rendered in-window text use a really awful pixelated font? It looks like what happens when a font gets rendered onto a pixel grid without any hinting or snapping.
phkahler 4 hours ago
It uses GNU unifont, which is a bitmap font. There could be a bug causing the text to get stretched a little - we had that on Windows prior to this release.
dfox 4 hours ago
It uses exactly the same font in the desktop version, and is probably entirely intentional.
ruevs 7 minutes ago
Intentional indeed. It is GNU Unifont - a 973KiB file that covers practically all of Unicode. In a bitmap font, platform independent, self contained, small. Practically all that SolveSpace strives to be.
https://www.unifoundry.com/unifont/index.html
Perhaps I've been using computers for too long but I actually like the non anti-aliased "sharp" and "pixely" look :-)
JoshTriplett 4 hours ago
I assumed it likely looked like the desktop version, and that was exactly what was motivating my question.
ponyous 5 hours ago
Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them!
markcheno 2 hours ago
I just ran into this today: https://github.com/gumyr/build123d - seems like an LLM should have no problem writing python code...
ur-whale 4 hours ago
> I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice
As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.
All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.
That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.
For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:
- Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based
- Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces
- Trimming surfaces
- Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)
- Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
FeepingCreature 4 hours ago
(my) fncad doesn't have the querying, but it does have smooth csg! https://fncad.github.io/
Zekio 3 hours ago
using BOSL2 alleviates most issues I've run into with OpenScad for chamfers and the like, but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly
ur-whale 2 hours ago
yangcheng 4 hours ago
I have tried OpenSCAD, it seems very slow to compile to display on web. are you using the official wasm or some other ways?
mikeayles 4 hours ago
you may find this useful: https://phaestus.app/blog/blog0031
Edit: Forgot I also got doom running in openscad: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/openscad-doom/
and doom running in openscad in the browser at https://doom.mikeayles.com/
ponyous 3 hours ago
I export it as .3mf file and display it with threejs on the web. Compilation seemed fast enough - few seconds tops.
IshKebab 4 hours ago
Yeah it does. In fact I believe it was written to demonstrate improved sketch constraint solving (there's a 2D version too).
Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.
steveharing1 5 hours ago
Currently I'm comfortable using FreeCAD but i'll try this one for sure.
TheJoeMan 5 hours ago
I scrolled with the mouse wheel and the origin drifts off screen.
Is there an open-source "cleanroom" re-implementation of the Parasolid kernel? I just like the way Solidworks does things vs. Autodesk.
gcr 5 hours ago
The mouse wheel zooms. The bounds of the axis stay fixed on the screen however. It will become more intuitive if you draw a circle to the screen first.
To pan around the space, use the right mouse button. To zoom, use the scroll wheel. To rotate, use Shift+Right mouse button.
Why not play with it a little bit before dismissing it so suddenly? I don't need to mention to a Solidworks/Autodesk user that CAD tools take some patience to understand properly :-)
phkahler 4 hours ago
>> To rotate, use Shift+Right mouse button.
Or middle mouse button / click the scroll wheel.
phcreery 5 hours ago
This is expected behavior. The zoom action is into the cursor center. This is the same behavior of many other 2d/3d editors, such as Autodesk Autocad, Inventor, etc. Even MS Paint does this. If you place your cursor perfectly at the origin, it will not appear to drift.
contingencies 2 hours ago
Ahh, but can it do a clean self-reversing diamond thread including the reversing portion?
mandarwagh 4 hours ago
Crazy
mclau153 3 hours ago
onShape does this already