[OpenSCAD] Does PythonOCC work better than CGAL in Cadmium...?

[Dan Zuras 3D]

	Jayesh,

	This looks promising.

	One of my criticisms of OpenSCAD has been the use of
	CGAL as a backend.  It is not that it doesn't work or
	doesn't produce pretty results, it does.  But it takes
	a disproportionately HUGE amount of computational
	resources (memory & time) to do it.  Thus a relatively
	simple design (with only a few thousand elements) can
	suck up gigabytes of memory & tens of minutes of time.
	Larger designs are just intractable.

	Therefore, your success leads me to ask two questions:

	(1) Does PythonOCC/OpenCASCADE do the job quicker &
	with fewer resources?

	(2) Can this be back ported into OpenSCAD?

	If the answer to (1) is yes, I might be willing to port
	to Cadmium if you plan to support it in the long term.

	But if the answer to (2) is yes, maybe none of us has to.

	Just curious...

				Dan Zuras

	P.S. - I have a suggestion:  It occurs to me that you might
	not KNOW if your approach is better/faster since your test
	cases have been things ported from OpenSCAD.  Let me suggest
	you try to design & render some fairly large fractal to some
	reasonable depth in the recursion.  If Cadmium cannot handle
	recursion it is sufficient to do the recursion explicitly in
	the code to a depth of say half a dozen or a dozen, depending
	on the fractal.  These are things I have found to be nearly
	impossible to do in OpenSCAD.  So if Cadmium can do them it
	might go a long way to demonstrating the worth of your
	approach.


> From: openscad-request at rocklinux.org
> Subject: OpenSCAD Digest, Vol 19, Issue 7
> To: openscad at rocklinux.org
> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:00:02 +0200
> 
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Cadmium update (Jayesh Salvi)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:37:04 +0530
> From: Jayesh Salvi <jayeshsalvi at gmail.com>
> Subject: [OpenSCAD] Cadmium update
> To: openscad at rocklinux.org
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> This week I managed to do decent progress with Cadmium and was able to
> get results that are good enough to share with you.
> 
> If you don't remember my Cadmium announcement couple of weeks ago:
> Cadmium is a python library for solid modelling, that implements
> similar abstractions like OpenSCAD, but as a python module.
> 
> A major breakthrough came after I switched from CGAL to PythonOCC as
> the backend. With CGAL I was facing a lot of assertion failures or
> crashes. Therefore I decided to give PythonOCC a try and it turned out
> to be a really good choice. The underlying OpenCASCADE library has so
> far been able to handle all the CSG operations I've thrown at it.
> 
> Because PythonOCC/OpenCASCADE can do most of the algorithmic work,
> only job that is left to Cadmium is to define simple abstractions
> (Box, Cylinder, etc.) and provide easy way to write CSG operations.
> 
> As a demo, I pulled out couple of OpenSCAD scripts from Thingiverse
> and translated them to Cadmium and the results turned out pretty well.
> 
> You can find them here:
> http://jayesh3.github.com/cadmium/
> 
> Please let me know what you think.
> Thanks,
> --
> Jayesh
>