GenCAD (gencad.github.io)

It says "can convert cad latents into a sequence of parametric CAD commands"

Which CAD program? I'm confused

Am I reading this right?

>Most importantly, GenCAD does not merely generate a 3D solid but also the entire CAD program.

Ideally it would tie in with an llm, no? Like you would want to be able to say something like "create a design of car suspension subject to x,y,z contrains"

Is this Google-affiliated? The heading font is Product/Google Sans which IIRC only Alphabet is allowed to use and the entire webpage seems to be Google-style but neither of the two named researchers seem to be employed by Google?

A another take on this problem is zoo.dev . They wrote a brand new from scratch cad engine that is driven a custom openscad style language called kcl.

Then then have a trained llm that has can generate kcl to either create new parts or act as a llm assistant for changes to existing parts.

It’s neat that llms can do 3-D but I wonder how much of the problem is integration.

This has been easy with OpenSCAD for a long time. I have made lots of cool, complex models this way. I built a repo of the prompts I use to show the llm how to do this and it includes many of the models I've created this way...

https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling

The examples they show are so basic.

Readers may also enjoy my open source Rust BRep CAD kernel https://github.com/ecto/vcad or the hosted version at https://vcad.io.

I also wrote a bit about what goes into CAD apps! https://campedersen.com/tessellation

To the author if they happen to see this. Please kill the auto playing video. If someone is listening to something else on their phone this always takes over and interrupts.

I wanted to see how well it performed on real pictures of parts or hand-drawn drawings, but when I tried setting up the docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed. The examples make me suspect it doesn't work well beyond images that were generated from CAD in the first place.

the idea is good, but the examples still feel like a distance to handle real constraints and dimensions

Website renders so poorly on my phone that I cant read half the text. Fits the bill for a slop project.

The demo seems pretty cool, but also pretty simple. When it comes to complicate models, I afriad it would be hard to generate the accurate 3D model.

Maybe I missed something, if you have the image rendering in the first place, you already (likely) have the CAD. It is a nice demo, but what is the utility?

Checked out GenCAD. It seems pretty useful for simple circuit designs. Wondering if it supports import/export with other CAD formats?

Neat, but I don't really see the utility. The time consuming part of CAD drawing comes from figuring out the correct dimensions of each feature, spacing, sizing, tolerances, etc., and constraining the drawing in a way so that it's easy to tweak later on- which this doesn't do at all. Maybe you could draw a 2d sketch of what you want then generate it, but you'd still have to do the hard part.

How are the input images generated?

[dead]

I spent a few hours trying to get this to work, and I couldn’t get it to produce usable results on anything except the training data, even with very simple drawings.

I noticed in the GitHub that they mention it is only around 60% reliable even on their own training data, but the image shown on the front page feels pretty misleading. I made 10 images that were very similar in complexity to the examples shown, and even after running it around 50 times on each image, not a single one worked correctly. In the rare cases where it produced something, the output was completely wrong.

This seems pretty misleading in its current state and definitely needs more work.

"In 1975, Dr. Joseph Sharp proved that correct modulation of microwave energy can result in wireless and receiverless transmission of audible speech."

This is over a year old now, why post now? There have been other advancements in this area.

I'm stumped by things like this. The drawing & modelling are not the difficult bit - the CAM programming is.

That seems difficult enough that I have not found an open source program to load a 3D model and allow me to set the toolpaths in a UI, never mind have an LLM generate them from the model.

Anyone finding this interesting will likely also like OpenSCAD - generate 3D CAD models from code. https://openscad.org/

I've seen this and other attempts like this[0] while exploring improvements for my CAD AI[1]. And I think these are potentially powerful solutions, but none of the current projects/weights have enough training (data or time) to make it work on arbitrary models. MeshCoder pretty much works only on models based of their training data. I haven't tried GenCAD but other commenters have confirmed my suspicion.

[0]: https://daibingquan.github.io/MeshCoder/

[1]: https://grandpacad.com

Wait. Could this be used for videos keeping consistencies across frames?

https://youtube.com/@thang010146

If you can get this to read dimensions and apply constraints, you've done it. But that doesn't look like the case.

Every time I see one of these things,its like whoever worked on it doesn't know how to use CAD or understand what CAD is used for.