FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software? 413
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?"
No Chance. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too."
Ideology won't get you to the moon.
Re:No Chance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame on you (Score:2, Insightful)
... 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.
Re:No Chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The first time it was equal parts arms race, chest-beating nationalism, and 100 billion dollars.
Is that so... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon"
No you're not.
BRL-CAD (Score:5, Insightful)
OSS CAD? (Score:1, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? OSS CAD software is very amateurish and useless for any serious design purposes.
Drop your ideology and purchase some professionally developed proprietary software.
Re:art people (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're not *really* sending a person to the moon, you're just faking a lunar landing :-)
Huh? Blender? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is that so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially not if you're putting additional constraints on your operation such as requiring every tool to be open source. It's hard enough when you're using the best tools.
Re:No Chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
with that kind of spin the trip to the moon sounds downright evil.
Compared to fighting it out throughout the developing world (as they both did), the Russian v US race to the moon was anything but evil.
lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a joke? Your team page [74.125.155.132] 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 [armadilloaerospace.com] 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.
Bwhahahaha - "engineers" drawing pretty parts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:3, Insightful)
They've got plenty of traffic now. Rather more than they can handle, it seems. If they can't build a web server that scales up, what makes them think they can build a spaceship?
Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model? Because the big problem with space travel is that there's never been one. Yeah, yeah, if Congress hadn't cut off the tap, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that space travel is going to have to start paying for itself eventually. Otherwise you'll never see anything except political vanity projects like Apollo and the ISS. These do produce some good science and technological spinoffs, but never enough to justify the billions poured into them.
Re:No Chance. (Score:5, Insightful)
The physics just don't hold up your argument, dude.
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:5, Insightful)
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?
"This dork can't even find himself a single woman to have sex with him, what makes him think he can write software that will attract millions of users?"
You see, it is possible to be highly competent at one thing and be not very competent in another. Even if they have the loose relationship of being two things that geeks tend to think are pretty cool, such as Engineering Spaceships and developing web sites and maintaining a web server.
Obviously I have not been able to view the web page due to it being slashdotted, but it is a good possibility that they didn't put much thought or effort into it. They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.
Or before even that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:FreeCAD (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, let me explain. Either you buy an excellent 3D drafting / modeling software, or you spend 1,000x that much on paper analyses done by PhDs and on testing of real parts done at ranges and in test flights. The latter approach was used for Moon rockets - cost was no object. Those guys are welcome to borrow $100B and do the same; or they can borrow $100-200K and buy the best tools that are available today. But using play-do for things that life depends on is, IMO, beyond silly. I'd call it criminal, though as someone else already said they have no chance to even get to the point where they can kill someone with their rockets.
I do mechanical design and simulations, by the way, in SolidWorks/CosmosWorks, in Inventor, and with CoCreate/Nastran tools. Probably more. So I know a thing or two about this.
The most serious post yet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Is that so... (Score:3, Insightful)
A million dollars won't buy you a small jet, let alone a damned moon rocket. Think, McFly.
Re:BRL-CAD (Score:4, Insightful)
BRL-CAD is probably just as powerful mathematically but it lacks all of the features from SolidWorks and Pro/E that make them easy to use.
There really is no OSS alternative for professional CAD users. If the BRL-CAD folks would take hints from the commercial CAD market with respect to UI usability, they would find a big uptick in user count.
Re:No Chance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that the US seemed to win the space race something like 3 - 8, I'd say no. The Russians beat the US to quite a lot of important milestones along the way to the moon. In the early years they were way ahead, and it wasn't until the end the US surpassed them.
Hadn't their ready-to-go manned lunar rocket exploded (destroying the launch-site) 2 weeks before Apollo 11 launched, they could have been first to walk the moon as well. Shame they didn't, as the US probably would have to go to Mars just to declare final victory...
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Several problems (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Several problems (Score:3, Insightful)
And while Linux started out that way, it didn't end up that way at all. There are many, many counterexamples to your assertion.
If your privately funded aerospace project is to have any credibility at all it must be seen visibly moving towards its goal. You can't afford to be sidelined for a decade while your FOSS engineering software plays catch-up.
G'luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a free CAD package that seems to be just the right caliber for your organization...Google SketchUp.
Re:FreeCAD (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment makes me wonder what Armadillo Aerospace could come up with (in software) for their own designs
This is not a new problem, really. What a startup didn't hear such a great idea from a young, enthusiastic engineer? "Boss, don't buy Quickbooks, don't waste $150, I will write the stuff for you for free!" If the boss doesn't know any better, such a proposition is usually a total loss. (Just have a look at QuickBooks for the proof.)
There are at least two issues at work here. First, do you have an expertise? And second, will your resources be better spent on something else, new perhaps, instead of reinventing the wheel?
As major CADs go, a mere $20K for a full SolidWorks seat is peanuts. Most of the labor that goes into the software is spent on interfaces; the rest is in licensed, very specialized libraries that do their job. For example, most 3D CADs use 3rd party math libraries that calculate all the solids and do all the heavy lifting. Simulation is very frequently done with 3rd party tools also, just because it's so hard to do fast. Ansys licenses their solvers to Autodesk, IIRC, as well as sells them independently (Ansys Workbench.) Then you go into the flow modeling (liquid, gas) and thermal modeling (in everything) - those represent yet another unique problem. The equations that describe the model are pretty well known [wikipedia.org]; the real challenge is to simplify the model enough so that the computation ends before you die from old age, and at the same time retains enough accuracy. Meshers are a popular, very complex problem, most FEA tools have several adaptive meshes, and a lot of effort goes into building them.
All that takes an awful amount of time and resources. Armadillo probably doesn't have enough expertise to code most of the hard stuff. Sure they can do GUI, but that's the easy part. They'd need probably a few decades, given their limited workforce, to recreate the existing software, and that would cost them a lot, and they'd be making no progress on the rocket, and they'd be getting no grants for any of that. Unless they want to enter the market of simulation tools, they'd be better off working on their main goals, and paying pocket change for access to missing knowledge and skills (in form of simulation software, or consultants, or whatever.)
Re:FreeCAD (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you fucking kidding me? I work in the industry that tftp describes and believe me... John Carmack is smart, but we are smarter. And we've been studying this stuff for a lot longer.
You really don't understand the enormous complexity, and the enormous progress already made, if you think one clever programmer is going to make any difference whatsoever.
Re:Several OSS CAD apps exist (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:5, Insightful)
The following I learnt the harsh way:
Image sells.
Present a nice image for your company, people will think better of you than a company which just slaps some crap together. Doesn't matter if the company with a crap website produces better product, image is important in getting the attention necessary for whatever goals you seek. It's the same reason why the geeks who get all the success are the ones who have learnt that social skills are more important than technical know-how.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
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/ [brlcad.org]
It has hit /. before http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/08/1823248 [slashdot.org]
Re:FreeCAD (Score:3, Insightful)
Via projects like openluna (which afait is a Uni spin out). So here you have a project, dedicated to bring the work of those PHDs into the public domain and all you can do is bitch about it?
Whats more, they are not just going to lauch some "man and women" on the moon, its a stepped program starting with robotics. This kind of project is the only way I can see of us ever breaking the (extremely lame) government monopoly on space flight.
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:3, Insightful)
Blender isn't CAD software. No matter how great the interface would be, its just not the right for the job of modeling parts that should end up as real hardware.
Re:FreeCAD (Score:3, Insightful)
Another dumb question : NASA, ESA, and most public research facilities are quite friendly to open source and frequently develop their own (I know NASA provides a fluid mechanics analysis tool for instance). Did you check what they use for CAD ?
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Those who post seldom read, those who read seldom post."
Re:BRL-CAD (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, you mean it's suffering from Gimp-disease.
Re:BRL-CAD (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they're suffering from this-isn't-goddamned-1972-unix. A cryptic CLI is no match for a well designed UI when it comes to solid modeling.
Re:Sure you are (Score:3, Insightful)
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.