Volmdlr: the absolute basics for beginners

Welcome to the absolute beginner’s guide to design3d! If you have comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Welcome to design3d!

The design3d library is an open-source Python library primarily developed by Dessia Technologies, aimed at providing 3D modeling capabilities based on Boundary Representation (B-Rep) purely in Python. The library is designed to be easy to use, efficient, and customizable.

Boundary Representation is a technique used in computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems to represent the geometry of a solid object as a collection of surfaces and curves. B-Rep is widely used in CAD and CAM due to its ability to accurately represent complex shapes and to provide a rich set of operations for manipulating and analyzing these shapes.

Installing design3d through pip (Windows and Linux users)

This package requires Python 3.9 or above. Please follow the instructions below to install the package. Depending on your needs, you can choose between two types of installation.

To install the latest version of the package you need to run the following command:

pip install design3d
# or
pip3 install design3d

To install a specific version of the package you would issue the following command:

pip install design3d==0.1.0
# or
pip3 install design3d==0.1.0

Developer installation

First, clone the package. Then, enter the newly created design3d repository. Finally, develop the setup.py file, and you are good to go !

git clone https://github.com/Dessia-tech/design3d.git

cd design3d

python3 setup.py develop --user
# or whatever version you are using :
python3.x setup.py develop --user

Requirements

The installation of design3d requires the installation of other packages listed in the file setup.py and in the table below. These libraries will be automatically installed when you install design3d.

Dependency

Minimum Version

Usage

packaging

latest

computation

dessia_common

>=0.10.0

computation

Cython

latest

computation

numpy

latest

computation

matplotlib

latest

display

scipy

latest

computation

geomdl

latest

computation

networkx

latest

computation

triangle

latest

computation

plot_data

>=0.10.9

display

kaitaistruct

latest

computation

binaryornot

latest

computation

sympy

latest

computation

trimesh

latest

computation

rtree

latest

computation

gmsh

latest

computation

Troubleshooting

If the installation is successful but your IDE don’t recognize the package

In this case you may have several versions of Python installed on your computer. Make sure the pip command points to the right Python version, or that you have selected the desired Python version in your IDE. You can force the installation of the package on a given Python version by executing this command:

python -m pip install design3d

You have to specify the Python version you are working with by replacing python by the Python of your choice. For example, python3, python3.8, python3.9, etc.