It s not a secret that I spent many years working for Open CASCADE. My colleagues had developed a lot of tools on top of OCCT kernel to demonstrate kernel s capabilities through 2010s. Some of them are in open-source (CADRays); others have closed sources but publicly available (CAD Assistant, CAD Builder). Official developers buried original dev.opencascade.org… Read More
Forks are unavoidable consequences of open-source development. Sometimes, developers are not happy with a development environment. Sometimes, they disagree with decisions and priorities. Despite the actual reason, the single development track is shattered into small pieces. Previously, when I worked for Open Cascade Company (OCC), I didn t pay much attention to forks around Open CASCADE… Read More
This note presents critique on the some papers in CAD or CAGD domain I read over several years. I highly appreciate academic research in CAD field; area lacks consistent academic research on any level. For me, publication on effective implementation of spline math might be research topic even today. Should we use de Casteljau algorithm… Read More
This note is result of a rare opportunity to sit alone in silence for several hours without being disturbed. It s good time to put some thoughts on the topic I ve been working for more than twelve years. I spent some time on development of end-user applications, but the vast majority of my experience (and personal… Read More
This note presents our rough thoughts on reverse engineering from a point cloud or mesh to b‑rep. This task naturally arises in many contexts such as laser scanning of manufactured parts (metrology), the need to repeatedly edit a CAD model after FEA analysis (topological optimization), and the need to edit supplier‑provided models, etc. The typical… Read More
This note is inspired by recent necessity to mesh big number of boundary represented models. I ve reworked previous sample showing Netgen to support both (Gmsh and Netgen) well-known open-source meshers. The source code is organized as main function allowing to switch between Netgen and Gmsh. It is shown below:
Available set of open-source tools is scarce when we talk about engineering software. Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) as modeling kernel; Netgen or Gmsh are libraries for meshing. Netgen is infamous for its tendency to change public interfaces. Whenever I need to use Netgen I have to figure out how to call it properly. Parameters are… Read More
We have been working with OCCT for many years, and OCCT surprises us over and over again. We noticed hang of testgrid command after migration to Windows 11. OCCT s tests capture memory and CPU consumption at the end of each test. We found that hang occurs in _heapwalk() method from c runtime library. OCCT employs… Read More
This note is a technical memo about lofting algorithm. Geometrically, lofting algorithm builds a surface passing through a set of user-given cross-sections. Academic background Gerald Farin in classic monography [1] mentioned the simplest type of lofting surface with linear connection between two cross-sections. For the two given curves \(c_1(u)\) and \(c_2(u\)) defined on the same… Read More
In June 2025, Dr. Fei-Fei Li gave a talk at AI Startup School in San Francisco. During this interview, she discussed the fundamental limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revealed what she considers an essential building block for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): spatial intelligence. This note has two goals: Foreword It should be noted that… Read More