Lloyd E. Sponenburgh wrote:
"Pete C." fired this volley in news:4988c526$0
:

BRLCAD also completely sucks.

But that's just my humble opinion.
So, Richard, what exactly about it sucks?

Just curious,

Stuart
I expect that like most things Linux, it is inconsistent, poorly
documented, minimally supported, and probably rather amateurish in
many
ways.



None of that really addresses BRLCAD's condition.

BRLCAD was written BY command-line programmers FOR command-line
programmers. It's a command-driven 3D CAD system that requires that
the user define objects with a list of parameters. It doesn't (didn't
at my last use) have an "intuitive" GUI interface. You cannot just
"draw" objects in it; you must _define_ them with a string of
operands.

Now... there are some benefits to that, like being able to ably
structure the order in which polygons are define, etc. But there are
quite capable post-processors in GUI-driven CAD systems that will re-
order your drawings in order to make "machine sense". So, the
inability to simply _draw_ a 3D object in BRLCAD makes it difficult to
use and completely un-intuitive to the visually-oriented user.

After all, it was developed by the military, FOR the military. What
about them has ever made much sense? (ex-Navy river-rat)

LLoyd

Actually, Lloyd, I DID reply to that.
But I don't see it here, so... try again!


Stuart Wheaton wrote:
cavelamb wrote:
Ignoramus14358 wrote:

BRLCAD is completely free software.

BRLCAD also completely sucks.

But that's just my humble opinion.

So, Richard, what exactly about it sucks?

Just curious,

Stuart


Heavy on the solid modeling but weak on intuitive drafting.

Lots of analysis features (that I'll never use).

My impression is that it's a great system for programmers
by programmers.

From Wiki:

Although BRL-CAD can be used for a variety of engineering and graphics
applications, the package's primary purpose continues to be the support of
ballistic and electromagnetic analyses. In keeping with the Unix philosophy of
developing independent tools to perform single, specific tasks and then linking
the tools together in a package, BRL-CAD is basically a collection of libraries,
tools, and utilities that work together to create, raytrace, and interrogate
geometry and manipulate files and data


But then I'm pretty spoiled, Stuart.
I was using Autocad (under DOS) when I discovered Design CAD.
Acad went into the bit bucket immediately, and Ive never regretted the choice.

The difference is that DC was designed by draftsmen to primarily do drafting.
Yes, it also does solid rendering, ray tracing, shadows and smoke and mirrors
(V18 on).

As usual, YMMV...


Richard