Forge is a 3D design solution for manufacturing and plant construction, currently under heavy development. It's written top-to-bottom in C++ using Qt5, primarily for (and on) Windows 10, although some thought has been given to keeping the codebase cross-platform for later porting.
A primary goal of Forge is to make failure easy. Iteration is part of any development process, and plant design is no different. Conventional manufacturing design applications have heavy processes that are awkward to configure and start, and that take a long time to complete. This inhibits creativity and risk-taking, because recovering from these processes is time-consuming, if it's even possible. By prioritizing speed, we make experimentation and failure recovery painless.
Forge will be rigorously tested and iteratively redesigned until there are no bugs. Nothing is worse, or breaks the design process more thoroughly, than an unexpected failure that destroys or corrupts project files. This goal supports the first, because speed isn't just the rate at which things get done- it's the number of times they have to be done.
Forge will be live. This means that as actions are completed locally, they will be shared across the network so that other users can see them. Communication, either through VOIP or direct messages, is a part of this. By allowing multiple designers to have eyes on the same work at the same time and communicate with each other about the project as it unfolds, Forge will support higher quality work and cooperation between designers.
- 3D Views
- Model creation control
- Model transform control
- JSON import
- Snap-to-surface / Snap-to-line
- Placement by two points
- Connections
- Slabs / walls
- Pipes
You should be able to simply open the root directory in Visual Studio, generate a CMake cache and then build. I've only tested with Visual Studio Community 2019, however.
Source the vcvars64.bat file:
>> "C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2019/Community/VC/Auxiliary/Build/vcvars64.bat"
Clone the repository and build:
git clone https://github.com/mjhouse/forge.git
cd bin/Release
cmake --build . --config Release
If you happen to be using Visual Studio Enterprise 2019, you could also run .github/scripts/windows-build.ps1 (a CI/CD build script).
This project is currently not looking for outside support.