I was wondering what you thought of making a version of your application that would generate gcode from models within the application called Blender 3D.
There are a few advantages that I think would be of great benefit to you (and your users):
- built upon a very popular platform (Blender has a lot of users, many of whom, like myself, come from a CAD background) and active developers. This would give you a lot of support as well as bump up the popularity of pycam a bunch.
- Blender is GPL OSS
- Blender has a built-in python scripting API, so "translating" what you've done here might not be very daunting.
- built upon a pretty feature-rich platform. (Modeling, GUI and visualization aspects already there to be tied in to.)
- has good STL & DXF I/O scripts (don't know how this might help you, but maybe...)
You've probably already looked at Blender (I noticed it mentioned in another thread) and thot it to be too oriented to DCC/creative/artistic use rather than technical. However, there is a significant number of technical users (architects, engineers) who use it for visualization purposes. Adding CNC code generation would be a *very* welcomed feature.
I was wondering what you thought of making a version of your application that would generate gcode from models within the application called Blender 3D.
There are a few advantages that I think would be of great benefit to you (and your users):
- built upon a very popular platform (Blender has a lot of users, many of whom, like myself, come from a CAD background) and active developers. This would give you a lot of support as well as bump up the popularity of pycam a bunch.
- Blender is GPL OSS
- Blender has a built-in python scripting API, so "translating" what you've done here might not be very daunting.
- built upon a pretty feature-rich platform. (Modeling, GUI and visualization aspects already there to be tied in to.)
- has good STL & DXF I/O scripts (don't know how this might help you, but maybe...)
You've probably already looked at Blender (I noticed it mentioned in another thread) and thot it to be too oriented to DCC/creative/artistic use rather than technical. However, there is a significant number of technical users (architects, engineers) who use it for visualization purposes. Adding CNC code generation would be a *very* welcomed feature.
Would you consider porting over to such a script?
Some links that might help:
http://www.blender.org/ (main website)
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ (user's forum - I'm "mzungu" on that forum.)
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/ (dev's mailing list info)
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page (manual + other info...)
pycam could easily be made into a plugin,
like it is already a plugin for HeeksCAD
http://heekscnc.blogspot.com/2009/01/zig-zag-thanks-to-pycam.html