Adam Urbanczyk

CadQuery (CQ) [1] is a Python library for building of parametric 3D models. The overarching design goal is to provide a fluent API that enables the user to express the design in a natural way. CQ is based on the open source CAD kernel from OpenCascade [2] and therefore offers industry standard B-Rep modeling capabilities and allows exporting to STEP and many other formats.

With the upcoming 2.1 release [3] there many improvements coming to CQ. I will briefly summarize them but will focus on the new assembly system. The new CQ version allows the user to combine individual CQ objects into an assembly with the possibility of nesting. The individual object positions can be specified manually in terms of constraints that are solved using a numerical solver. Once an assembly is defined and all the positions specified it can be exported to STEP preserving the assembly structure or an internal OpenCascade XML format. In the I will discuss the current assembly system design, capabilities, limitations and possible future development directions.

References

[1] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

[2] https://dev.opencascade.org/

[3] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/releases/tag/2.1RC1

CadQuery (CQ) [1] is a Python library for building of parametric 3D models. The overarching design goal is to be extremely fluent and as close as possible to the design intent. CQ is based on the open source CAD kernel from OpenCascade and therefor offers industry standard B-Rep modeling capabilities and allows exporting to lossless formats such as STEP as well as lossy ones such as STL. Originally it used Python bindings based on FreeCAD [2] but recently we switched to PythonOCC [3] to be more flexible and have full access to the underlying CAD kernel capabilities. In the talk I will summarize the current status of the CQ project, show some interesting usage examples and discuss newly implemented features. Furthermore I will elaborate on the future plans of the core development team and touch on some of the challenges of maintaining a project such as CQ. I will also present a fairly new addition to the CQ ecosystem – CQ-editor [3]. It is a Python/PyQt5 based lightweight cross-platform GUI editor that allows to quickly develop and preview CQ 3D models. It also offers graphical debugging and CQ stack introspection capabilities which dramatically lowers the entry barrier for trying out and using CQ.

References

[1] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery [2] https://www.freecadweb.org [3] https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc-core [4] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor