fponticelli / ao

Homoiconic CAD package

Disclaimer

This generation of Ao is not yet ready for mass consumption.

It's coming along nicely – and if you've found your way here, you should try it out! – but there's very little documentation, no stability guarantees, and limited support.

Please enjoy it responsibly and refrain from posting it to the wider web.

About

Ao is a framework for solid modeling using functional representations.

It includes several layers, ranging from infrastructure to GUI:

• libao-kernel is a shared library to build, manipulate, and render f-reps. A great deal of work has gone into the meshing algorithm, which produces watertight, manifold, hierarchical, feature-preserving triangle meshes. The library is written in C++ and exposes a C API in ao/ao.h.
• libao-guile is a Guile binding to libao-kernel. It exposes a high-level API to construct shapes, and includes a standard library of shapes, transforms, and CSG operations.
• Studio is a GUI application in the style of OpenSCAD. It wraps libao-guile and allows for live-coding of solid models. The interface also includes direct modeling, where the user can push and pull on the model's surface to change variables in the script.

Building

Dependencies

Geometry Kernel

• Eigen 3.x
• libpng

Bindings and GUI

• Qt 5.7 or later
• Guile 2.2 or later

Invocation

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/qt5/5.7.0  ..
make

Adjust based on your Qt installation path, and consider using ninja for faster builds.

License

(c) 2015-2017 Matthew Keeter

Different layers of this project are released under different licenses:

• ao-kernel is released under the LGPL, version 2 or later.
• guile-ao and Studio are released under the GPL, version 2 or later.

Contact me to discuss custom development, integration, or commercial support.

Using the standalone Guile module

scheme@(guile-user)> (load-extension "ao/bind/libguile-ao" "scm_init_ao_modules")
scheme@(guile-user)> (use-modules (ao csg) (ao transforms) (ao shapes))

Note that the standalong module does not include the minimal OpenGL-based GUI described here. That GUI is no longer maintained, but can be found in the ao-guile-repl branch.