Leap 71 has open sourced a powerful computational engineering software framework.
Fabbaloo readers may recall our series over the past week introducing the concept of computational engineering. You can read the first part here, which links to the rest.
For those that want a quick recap, Computational Engineering is a new method to create complex 3D models. There are generative approaches where fundamental forces are defined, and a system evolves a solution for those forces, but computational engineering takes the concept to a much higher level.
A computational engineering model would focus on a specific domain. It would accept some descriptive inputs and then literally generate the entire 3D model automatically.
How do you obtain these sophisticated computational engineering models? Leap 71’s concept is to use the following components:
- a voxel field (narrow-band signed distance field, SDF)
- a way to render implicits (to create infills, lattices, and other formula-based volumetric objects)
- a way to render triangle meshes
- Boolean operations to combine voxel fields
- an offset operation that allows for negatively and positively offsetting the voxels
These together form what they call a tiny computational engineering kernel, and it forms the base on which astoundingly complex 3D models can be swiftly generated.
And that’s what they’ve open sourced today: a “pico” sized geometry kernel that contains these functions.
The platform is named PicoGK, pronounced “Peacock”. It’s now available for download and use on GitHub by anyone, free of charge.
This could be a turning point in the history of 3D model design, and by extension, the world of manufacturing. Computational engineering is so powerful that it will enable far easier creation of highly complex 3D printable models. These have been effectively inaccessible to many product designers due to the lack of appropriate software tools.
With the open sourcing of PicoGK, it’s very likely we will soon see a slew of open source and commercial software tools emerge that provide computational engineering functionality.
However, computational engineering is a very new topic that currently few understand. It will take some time for the concepts to soak into our environment.
A big thank you to Leap 71 for providing this powerful open source tool for the world to use.
