One smart guy told me that a manufacturing plan should always be questioned, even when it is composed by a pretty respectable software package, whatever it is, Mastercam or Fusion360, you name it. …

Preface Let’s talk about the XDE framework that we touched on in the previous article. XDE stands for the eXtended Data Exchange module provided by the open-source OpenCascade kernel for representing CAD assemblies and engineering metadata. Other names that are sometimes used for the same thing are XCAF, and even DECAF…

When we discussed how to colorize faces coming from a STEP file, our use case was communicating threads for CAM. There’s one remark to this method though. What if the original model has some design colors already baked in? Apparently, these colors are going to mess up with the ones…

Let’s talk about 3D visualization on the web. Since I am not a WebGL guru whatsoever, we’ll limit this discussion with higher-level libs and formats that allow getting work done without much effort. Because Analysis Situs employs VTK as a visualization engine, it is logical to construct web visualization frontend…

People use this famous open-sourced mesher as a cost-efficient (well, just free) tool for quality mesh generation. At some point we also felt the urge to have a fancy mesher instead of the low-poly faceter provided with OpenCascade. Here is the Tcl script that generates meshes for all STEP files…

There are at least two metrics you normally wanna control in your software: how fast it is and how much memory it consumes. We usually start with the performance issues, as they are easy to spot: lack of performance rarely remains invisible. You know when it’s lagging, right? A bit…

To understand how a specific surface is parameterized, you can, for example, go and check the documentation on OpenCascade trying to find there the corresponding math equation or something like that. However, in practice, you might need to assess the parameterization flow over a surface just to locate its U…

Preamble On our forum, we discussed how to pass thread features via a STEP file. The workflow to automate is outlined below: The user uploads a STEP file somewhere in a web-based frontend. All drilled holes are recognized automatically. The user selects cylindrical bores and clicks some buttons to associate threads…

Our forum slowly but surely becomes what it was supposed to be and what this blog failed to become: a knowledge database for CAD software engineers. Let’s call these people “engineers” (although there is a different point of view on that matter) because it’s not that much about programming and…