Screw Treads

[winksaville]

I see screw threads are on your todo list, how far out are they? I have a desire to test making treads on my new resign 3D printer, so this isn't necessary as I can create them using other tools, so just wondering.

[timschmidt]

A little way out to be honest. Couple weeks? I have been working recently on the 2D subsystem - both extending cavalier_contours to have a set of multi-polygon boolean functions, and porting csgrs to geo which I don't like quite as much as cavalier_contours, but has a much larger community and more functions, including multi-polygon booleans already. The geo port is almost in usable shape - most of the heavy lifting is done, just a few bugs to squash and the last bits of cavalier_contours to rip out. I think I will move the current cavalier_contours 2D subsystem fork to it's own branch when I promote the geo branch as part of 0.16.0 for which I want to have working 2D booleans.

The good news is that the 2D subsystem is nearly sorted either way, and as soon as it is, I will release 0.16.0, and then I can get back to building new features instead of fixing the ones I've just broken for myself.

[winksaville]

Sounds like great progress!

[timschmidt]

Really good progress today as well. rotate_extrude and extrude_vector are working well now, two of the trickiest functions. With a functional 2D subsystem, moving forward, all extrudes will be required to extrude a 2D shape into 3D. This will allow me to solve the one open issue against csgrs at the moment, drastically improving the geometry of extruded shapes. Functions like flatten() and slice() will help move shapes from 3D to 2D for extrudes when necessary. Looks like geo also opens up access to lots of well written 2D data I/O libraries for a hundred formats or more. Lots of really great functions now available in 2D: https://docs.rs/geo/latest/geo/

I will soon begin to break off a shapes library, to de-clutter csg.rs, and that will be about the time to expect screw threads to show up.