topax 0.0.3

Topax - A Full Stack Implicit Geometry CAD Package for Python

Topax - A Full Stack Implicit Geometry CAD Package for Python

Topax is a CAD package specifically designed for working with implicit geometry and programmatic CAD generation. It pulls a lot of ideas from previous work such as libfive.

What makes this tool special is that it comes with a live viewer/editor that updates in real-time as python code is changed. Objects are rendered using direct ray-marching and JIT compiled OpenGL shaders.

This tool is under active development! Please consider contributing if you find this interesting and would like to help out.

Quick start

For now, this package needs to be installed by cloning the repo. You can clone the repo with git clone https://github.com/andycate/topax.git and then install the package by running pip install -e . inside the cloned directory.

You can check out the examples in the examples/ folder by running topax examples/. Once the shell has opened up, type target("<example_file_name>.py") with one of the example file names and the example should appear. Now, try changing some of the parameters in that file. When you save the file, you'll notice that the model is instantly updated.

The vision + Resources

Not really sure where I'm going with this project, but I found it interesting to build! I think it would be cool to do a few different things:

1. Optimize the shaders that are generated to increase rendering performance
2. Add a way to make assemblies of single parts
3. Add lots more standard SDFs to the library
4. Add a way to specify variable parameters, and have those parameters adjustable as sliders or buttons on the CAD viewer window
5. Add some kind of interactive manipulation of objects in the CAD viewer window
6. Maybe add a way to run simulations and then use generated fields to manipulate geometry?
7. Some kind of geometry optimization???

Inigo Quilez has written lots of great articles about implicit modeling on his website. So has Matt Keeter, who also developed libfive. Also, there is a commercial CAD package called nTop, which I believe is built on top of libfive.

Disclaimer

I know that there are certain tools that already exist which do these things, and I'm not trying to replace them, I'm mostly doing this as a learning experience! And maybe some people will find it useful along the way.