I played with it a little after it was announced on the mailing list, and it is indeed pretty cool, but I’ll admit I was hoping for something a little more Maslow-oriented…
Notably, I think a Maslow-oriented CAD should make it very easy to work on sheet goods. Something like Fusion’s sketches, but with some facilities for assembling pieces together and transferring them to a flat layout for CAM.
In particular, one thing that’s annoying but should be easy do do for a computer is putting in tabs for assembly, jigsaw patterns do join long pieces together, that sort of thing.
The downside to imports is that they can really slow things down since they can have an arbitrary number of points in them. Like a circle created in Abundance is a single mathmatical object that defines a circle, but a .svg of a circle could be made up of 10,000 little lines which really slows things down computationally so while imports do work, they should sort of be used with caution.
According to Wikipedia, SVG has a “path” element which can incorporate curved segments:
Simple or compound shape outlines are drawn with curved or straight lines … Further command letters (C, S, Q, T, and A) precede data that is used to draw various Bézier and elliptical curves.
Depending on how Abundance handles things, it might be possible to import these path elements and/or approximate (i.e., fit) sequences of short straight lines with curve descriptions.
Hi Bar, I have had a play with this and I like it but
The messages, titles are hard to read
I have been trying to generate a cone shape but have no idea how to do it.
This is a low priority compared with all the alternate work you are doing so no rush.
(When do you sleep?)
That is excellent feedback! Which parts specifically are hard to read?
For a cone shape the best way to do it is with the “loft” tool. Move one circle in the z-direction and then loft it with a circle that hasn’t been moved
In which I want to remove notches on the side of the rectangle, but you can see the results. I tried to change my notches to not match up with the edge of the base rectange because I believe you mentioned something like that in the video, but I got the same results.
Hi, thanks for pointing this out. Yes, there seems to be some issues cutting sketches and we are working on solving that. For now what I would suggest extruding your shapes before you connect them to the difference.
I kept at it, moving the colors to each individual atomic shape and was able to get slots and corner relief to render correctly as seen below in MakerCAM. I just need to add some more corner relief.
The last color in the list is “keep out”, it is special, and means that nothing can occupy that space, in the same grouping. I used in the demo above with the assembly function. Also the order you attach inputs to assembly is important. Main first then what you are cutting out.
Something seems funky with the svg output. I get different scale and proportions based on where I load it (MakerCAM, Inkscape).
I know I just dove in and started making demands, but let me say I really like Abundance, I can already tell it will be a useful tool in my workflow. It’s very pleasant to use (perhaps because I currently do most of my 3d modelling in openscad).
With everyone’s help I got pretty close to where I wanted to be when I started playing with Abundance. Everything should be parametric based on stock thickness, including placement of corner relief (unless I missed something).
I’m using constants for my parameters, spread across multiple molecules, it would be nice if that could be centralized somehow.
Numeric values visually round to 1 or 2 places which is a little disconcerting even though it’s using the actual value.
There were some operational or ui glitches along the way. Sometimes I had to delete and recreate assemblies that seemed to get into a confused state.
Very minor thing that I found a little strange, they way inputs to interactions with a variable number of inputs keep counting up if the connections are deleted, but it wasn’t actually a problem in operation.
Sometimes two connections would get connected to a single input (it seemed to reload that way on occasion). Only one of the connections could be deleted so the entire interaction had to be recreated to reset it.
Now if I could figure out the svg strangeness I would be pretty close to a cuttable design.
