Dear folks,
out of curiosity as a (systems) programmer, i'm currently evaluating a number of (solid) modellers and their implementation techniques. What i am seeing is the almost absolute dominance of boundary representation schemes. I would expect to see more CSG based modellers since they are far better suited for CAD/CAM IMHO. Shelling, filling and rounding etc. can also be expressed in CSG so why the dominance of B-rep? And are there real CSG modellers around still even? BRL-cad comes to mind but it comes over to me as ancient and with a horrible user interface.
SolidWorks, CATIA, IronWorks, Unigraphics NX to name a few all seem to work on the ParaSolid kernel with different user interfaces and tools and thus are basicly boundary based though annotated on how the solid was created.
Well, since you folks are working with CAD on a daily basis, do you think that a non B-rep CSG based system could be feasable or would even be desirable if confined to industrial design and manufacturing i.e. not for pretty pictures but for machinable parts? Would NURBS free form primitive support be crucial? or is it overrated in this field of work?
With regards, Reinoud