<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 7:52 PM, Mats Eriksson <<a href="mailto:datorfixarn@gmail.com">datorfixarn@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
First of all, thanks guys for interesting replies to my original post!<br>
</blockquote><div><br>Thank you for posting.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">But the big difference between these image data and CAD data is that the specifications are open for the image data, but not for the CAD data. Please correct me if I am wrong.<div class="Ih2E3d">
</div></blockquote><div><br>Many of the specs are indeed published, if not "open". STEP, DXF, DWF, STL and some others are all published and usable. Image processing had a huge market to push toward openness and relatively standardized formats. CAD systems are just now gaining momentum. The market is not moving very fast. The industry is dominated by large companies, and much of the advancement is coming from large customers. The usefulness of precise CAD models is a much smaller target than images. Everybody takes pictures, and websites display images all the time. Even the 3D work that is out there now doesn't really fit this bill, since it's not made up of precise solid or surface models. <br>
<br>I think before long computers will be powerful enough to use precise models and calculations for common tasks, which will bring these standardization issues forward. Right now, Vista, OSX and Compiz use 3D and high-cost computations just to move windows around and make funny noises. Surely we can harness some of this upcoming power to create stunningly complex, interconnected precise to 128 decimal places to project onto a 1600x900 pixel space. (Gee, that sounds like Marvin the Paranoid Android).<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Since it's unlikely nor desirable that a single standard will emerge for mechanical or schematic capture, we came up with the idea of putting out a call to the open source community to develop tools to convert from from one format to another.<br>
<br>
Some of this exists already, for example in Blender's ability to import from a number of different file formats. But we would like to see a project dedicated to creating a collection of tools to do this.<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div>
Could "CAx functionality" be built on top of Blender?</blockquote><div><br>Yes and no. Blender could be a front end. You could (and some have tried to) make a plugin for blender to modify models parametrically, which is a start. Unfortunately, this is adding on from the outside, so is very slow and crude.<br>
<br>Conversion tools exist, although I don't know of many in the open source space. It seemingly would not be too hard to do, but those formats are immensely different in the way they handle data. Every CAD program reads a wide variety of formats, just like Blender. No company wants to lose a sale over such a silly reason.<br>
<br>To answer the original question, I'd help with a project (I'm not signing up to maintain ;-). The task of a conversion utility would be something any random developer could work on without any special knowledge.<br>
<br><br>--Mark Arvidson<br></div></div>