Feature wish-list

[bschwind]

In no particular order

• [ ] Create part 3-views, with dimension annotations
• [ ] Automatic fillets at the intersection of joined solids
• [ ] Easy to create curved surfaces with bounded edges and a "profile" wire - see here
• [ ] Variable radius fillets
• [ ] Plate deformation with curves (take a flat profile and "bend" it along a curve)
• [ ] 3D viewer with material/texture support
• [ ] Lightweight model code (written in Rust) which compiles to WASM for the 3D viewer to interpret as commands and build the model
• [ ] Ability to define GUI widgets (egui?) on part features, for adjustability in the viewer app
• [ ] Ability to import Kicad PCB files directly (no intermediate exports from kicad needed)
• [ ] Ability to import STEP files and reference parts (#33)
  • [ ] https://dev.opencascade.org/content/reading-step-file-occt
• [ ] Ability to import SVG files as sketches for later use
• [ ] Projection of parts onto planes or surfaces
• [ ] STEP export
• [ ] Ability to "tag" certain features as you build a part, to reference later when building (example: drill a hole with a cylinder, but tag the bottom face of the cylinder to have a location to start from for future operations
• [ ] Some sort of "timeline" in the viewer app to scrub through all the steps and see the model get created at each step
• [ ] Having a "source map" of objects to the lines of code which created it would be super cool, though maybe infeasible
• [ ] Ability to create a quick sketch in the viewer app and export that sketch to Rust code. Essentially, bidirectional editing between code and GUI would be ideal
• [ ] Font shape support for putting text on shapes
• [ ] VSCode integration

[bschwind]

Rendering Features

• (Subjective) Default rendering should look nice and have somewhat of a signature look to differentiate the tool.
• Wireframe
• Hidden line removal
• "X-Ray" view of hidden lines (can these two line rendering problems be taken care of simply with the depth buffer?)
• Simple shading
• Physically-based rendering
• Ambient occlusion
• (Nice to have) UV unwrapping
• (Nice to have) Ambient occlusion / lightmap / raytracing baking
• (Nice to have) Some kind of CSS-based theming for model colors / materials would be interesting

References

• https://github.com/Jasper-Bekkers/xatlas-rs
• https://github.com/prideout/aobaker
• https://github.com/ands/lightmapper

[julianschuler]

Regarding the renderer: It might be worth having a look at three-d since it already provides a lot of features like lighting, physically-based rendering, shadow maps, orbital control, etc.

It is quite simple to transfer the mesh representation of this library to the one three-d uses, see here for a proof of concept.