Innovative CAD/CAM software

This has come up in some separate discussions, and I thought it merited its own thread.

Here are a couple of applications which I’ve become aware of which have interesting interfaces — curious as to what folks’ thoughts are, and what other applications there might be.

This just came up in my newsfeed:

https://www.gravitysketch.com/

from the article:

Apparently you use a pair of VR goggles and a special pen to sketch in 3D space, allowing one to create a wireframe hanging in the air (the photo in the article shows a car).

Moment of Inspiration:

http://moi3d.com/

This was mentioned at: https://www.grzsoftware.com/users/cad/ and is notable for being a 3D program developed by the lead developer of Rhino and intended for use with graphics tablets.

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Shapr3D:

(for the cool kids with iPad Pros and Apple Pencils who are willing to use a 3rd party CAM tool such as MeshCAM)

First you need to know how to draw well freehand. :wink:

Well, for folks who can’t draw there are tools such as OpenSCAD and Rhino 3D with Grasshopper.

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I need a drawing program that can turn my stickman into a 3D rendering of David. :wink:

The scary thing is that with AI, that sort of thing will probably happen presently — apparently the “deepnude” software was recently opensourced (or reverse engineered? I only saw the headline/mention, didn’t bother to read the article).

There is of course Poser:

https://www.posersoftware.com/

Picked up a copy from a CD bundled w/ a British software magazine ages ago, but at the time didn’t have a machine with a video card which could run it.

I have used the demo of Shapr3D on my Ipad Pro with pencil. Once I got it worked out it was surprisingly easy to use, I felt that if you could pair it with a built in iOS slicer/postprocessor and could send the file over wifi to 3Dprint or cut on CNC that it would be a pretty cool workflow for simple objects

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Can you send STLs to a Mac which has MeshCAM and Carbide Motion on it?

If the Mac has Sidecar you’d be able to control everything from it.

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I reckon you could go that way - unfortunately I can’t test that, I have been using PC’s for a year or two now - Use Solidworks and Aspire a lot so a PC is the easier option for me.

I wonder if you could interface your iPad with a printer or router running octoprint or similar? I reckon the Nomad running something like octoprint with a little 7" touch screen would be awesome

Maybe this is the first step towards that?

Taken my first steps into 3D today using Blender. I took a purchased STL file and added the raised text (with a bevel) onto it.

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Thank this is interesting if very scant on details, no dates, no information on platform supported, price, built-in capabilities, ability to export, etc. I’ll have to keep an eye on it