Yet another Hacker News

20 points reacharavindh 1 day ago 14 comments

I’m a hobbyist woodworker. I manually design simple things in Shapr3d with a lot of patience when I build things. I wonder in the time of LLMs if there is an effective way to accelerate the 3D model design using AI.. Anybody tried using AI to model wood projects? Any tools to recommend?

maouida 1 day ago | parent

I'm a developer and hobbyist woodworker too :)

I'm also the developer of FluidCAD. It has an MCP you can wire to any LLM. It runs locally on your machine.

It is still missing features for splitting the model into parts, but that is coming in a future release.

https://fluidcad.io/

MCP config (node.js required): https://fluidcad.io/docs/cli/#fluidcad-mcp

catchmeifyoucan 27 minutes ago | parent

This looks really cool! Nice work

variodot 1 day ago | parent

I'm building ShopSpec (https://shopspec.io/) for this kind of workflow. I'm a woodworker and use it for my own home and shop builds.

It's a woodworking domain engine and parametric furniture builder focused on projects like bookshelves, cabinetry, and shop furniture. It works out the parts, joints, cut list, etc.

There is an MCP component in beta (https://shopspec.io/agents) that allows an agent to explore designs while the engine still does the math. To take a design to CAD, a project can be exported as DXF or as a Ruby script that rebuilds it in SketchUp Pro.

It's narrower than Shapr3D, but it might fit the projects you describe.

jdenning 13 hours ago | parent

This looks really nice, I'll give it a shot with my next project!

dingaling911 1 hour ago | parent

This is so clever.

contingencies 1 hour ago | parent

This is cool. I have a friend getting in to furniture making and forwarded this, however: (1) You need a metric default outside of the US. (2) >4 shelves does not work. (3) 'Other' hardwood type not possible. (4) Could not find a way to get chamfer to render on slab top.

jen20 52 minutes ago | parent

This looks fantastic - great job!

antoineMoPa 1 day ago | parent

Not yet fully baked, but I am planning to add a woodworking mode to claydash with natural cutting UI - For now I have a couple of wood materials and there is the ability to extrude + cut faces à la sketch up, which should work for simple projects.

The local version has a MCP server.

see https://claydash.com/

Sevii 54 minutes ago | parent

I've had good results with Claude Code + OpenSCAD.

kentlyons 43 minutes ago | parent

Claude Code is now WAY better at the freecad python api. My product (related to ceramics) does a whole bunch of custom 3d modeling and the new generation of LLMs can go in and make significant changes and basically get it right. They can also deal with a lot of annoying corner cases when you run into them.

TrueDuality 22 minutes ago | parent

I've also had really good success with FreeCAD, and the FreeCAD MCP server. So far I've had it design and build a custom workbench (woodworking project w/ cut list, assembly and hardware instructions, tool and part check lists) as well as a omni-directional differential style robot wheel module for a 3D printing.

I will say the differential wheel module was on the edge of what it was able to do. I had to bump it up to Fable and if I didn't already have a clear model in my head of what I wanted I don't think it could have pulled it off.

tcdent 22 minutes ago | parent

For realizing designs in physical space, I create a Python library with a DSL that allows us to express all of the components and how they relate with each other. The most important thing this provides is a deterministic way to test the assembly. Then, you take the parameterized relationships between the components and export them into things like three-dimensional views or cut lists, rather than trying to manipulate three-dimensional software as your source of truth. (Although Claude is pretty effective at driving Blender via Python, too.)

meetingthrower 6 minutes ago | parent

I am a woodworker mostly but do it all on pencil and paper. That said I have a 3d printer and cnc and fusion360 with the Claude mcp connector has been pretty amazing in my tests. One more year and it will be a new world.

I have gotten just "ok" at CAD. I'm not as productive as I should be because I avoid it. Really looking forward to this.

m4rkuskk 5 minutes ago | parent

I'm a developer and a previous commercial concrete superintendent. I built a 3d model designer similar to Autodesk Revit as well as a pdf editor similar to Bluebeam. You can connect MCP to it to build full buildings based of drawings.

https://builder.auxx.ai/

Everything is stored locally (with cloud feature coming soon as well as desktop versions.)