[sk2020]

Programmatically generating geometry is very cool, but I don’t know of anyone doing real work with it. OpenSCAD is probably the best power-hobbyist software I know of for this purpose. AutoDesk seems to be trying this approach with DyanamoBIM, which I’m excited to experiment with (I just don’t get visual programming though).

Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profit model makes me think you’re looting my intellectual property to resell, mining crypto with obfuscated JS or WASM, or you’re snatching up market share to get bought by Google who will just kill the service and leave me hanging.

There’s a lot of room for better software in AEC but CAD is pretty robust and very affordable at this point.

[criddell]

AutoDesk has supported this kind of automation from almost the very beginning (originally you had to use their Lisp variant AutoLisp but now there's more flexibility).

I agree with you about the web-based criticism though. Working in a browser feels pretty limiting and it's so slow.

[buildsjets]

I've been programmatically generating geometry in Dassault CATIA since 1998 or so. Relational Design is essentially the CAD version of object oriented programming.

[jpgleeson]

Grasshopper, which Dynamo is really trying to compete against, is in wide use in the architecture world.

[andreseg]

I would encourage looking into Rhino3D and Grasshopper3D. As @jpgleeson mentions - this is already widely used by architects as they move from a world of buildings made up of mass-produced identical components (e.g., every brick is the same shape and size), to a world where mass customization is possible (e.g., every brick has variable shape, massing, structural properties, etc.). Being able to prescribe that programmatically has a lot of promise. Tools like Grasshopper already enable some of this customization via code as you can see here https://developer.rhino3d.com/guides/rhinopython/ghpython-ca...

Plugging into existing frameworks (like Rhino) is quite easy and can open the door to other realms of optimization/simulation for the designs you are scripting. For instance you could leverage generative design (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HLRtXSG7fQ) and other software that can be used to evaluate designs according against variety of criteria ranging from structural integrity, to environmental performance, to 3d-printability, etc. If there’s open source frameworks you can plug into, even better.. and if not.. then maybe that’s what’s missing: an easy standard way for various opensource projects to share and edit information.

Programmatically-defined designs make sense to me only if you can easily change parameters to quickly produce, evaluate, and optimize the designs/variations/results. Otherwise - Better to use a GUI that allows for more direct (and less abstracted) expression of designer intent

Similarly open source CAD makes sense if it can be augmented by other open source projects - including sharing and editing data from these various projects

[xor99]

Yeah these are mostly used for architecture. Seemingly exclusively to produce the same generative style

[mywittyname]

> Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profit model

I worked on a web-based version of a major player in the industry and the projected ended up getting canned. Ironically, because (I think) they really couldn't figure out a good way to profit from it. A license for the desktop product was like $xx,000, but the ideas tossed around for the web-based version were like $y.00 per minute of instance time (basically like EC2 pricing). Turns out that $y would need to be Very Large to be even remotely profitable.

The product itself was pretty slick though. I was really surprised at how well it performed.

[xupybd]

We use https://www.cadcode.com/ for our production of furniture.

It's a little different but essentially it takes data to define geometry and machine operations. We generate that data in code and pass it on to cadcode. Cadcode then passes that on to our NC machines.

[GordonS]

I've previously worked at 2 large engineering companies in the oil and gas space, and both were using automation to generate CAD models from configuration - not exactly the same thing, but close enough. They were doing this with both AutoCAD and SolidWorks.

[ahupp]

> Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use.

I've seen a lot of enthusiasm for OnShape (a relatively new web-based CAD tool) among professional CAD users, particularly when there's more than a handful of people working on one project.

[zokier]

I think the parametric constraint driven way of doing CAD is actually already pretty programmatic. While I'm not sure, I'm imaging that there might be some sort of isomorphism between CAD-style constraints and Prolog-style logic programming...