Linux, CAD, and the way forward

[CGN]

Quote: Originally Posted by Tim B

Sorry this is a bad review, I may not have explored it far enough, but what I diid explore I found rather cumbersome. I'm also concerned at the price, $310 (USD) for the academic version... Rhino was £120 when I bought it, even if the exchange rate was $2 to £1 Rhino is only $240 for the academic version (I admit the full TouchCAD license is cheaper, but I'm not interested in paying full price).

Hi Tim, do you sell your work commercially using the student versions?, or you actually own the full version? (Rhino3D), i asked becouse you mentioned this: "(I admit the full TouchCAD license is cheaper, but I'm not interested in paying full price)", i was wondering is is possible to use an student verison for comercial purposes.

Thank you

[RuKK]

CGN: Rhino allows you to use the student version for commercial work legally. No idea if the same goes for TouchCad or others.

I'm still working on getting rhino 3 to run, mostly because I want flamingo to work. Looks like its going to involve making some kind of interface for wine to use nwlink.vxd.

[Fred2]

THANKS!!...every day is something new to learn thank you RuKK!

[Tim B]

Ok, let me try to explain some of the things I have said so far. Firstly I need a CAD package to service me in one simple way... to build accurate surfaces and allow me to export them as control points and weights. Secondly, the need to be NURBS surfaces (I have written an entire design package based on b-splines anyway - see one of my other threads under software for details) and I need it to do it quickly and smoothly. If it can't do that, I'm not remotely interested and nobody's going to convince me otherwise ('cos it doesn't do what I want it to).

Ok, my comments about pricing... the student Rhino license is a full commercial license. However, I rarely get design work to do, and so, as a student, I use it mostly for my own private work and research.

I'm sorry I haven't moved on with the problem but I will try to get on with it tomorrow evening as I got snowed under with reports shortly after starting this thread.

Cheeers all, and thankyou for your help in this, Rukk,

Tim B.

[Andrew Mason]

Tim

Maxsurf Academic -
cost - zero for students
control point export - via iges, text file or clipboard
Runs fine under emulation on a Mac, should do the same in Linux

[gregc]

Have you considered LinuxCAD? http://www.linuxcad.com/ It's very cheap $165 and runs native on Linux. It has 3D capability but I'm not sure about NURBS or b-splines.

The only other options are:

ARCAD http://www.arcad.de/ (brush up on your German)
VariCAD http://www.varicad.com/ (heavy on mech. engineering)

I'd also keep an eye on VectorWorks http://www.vectorworks.com. They have ported their software to Mac OSX, so a native Unix/Linux version shouldn't be far behind.