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Zoo CAD Engine Overview | Zoo

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A CAD engine (often called a CAD kernel) is responsible for representing the model geometry such as B-Rep, NURBS, CSG etc., and for executing the common operations performed by CAD software such as extrusion, revolution, lofting, etc. CAD engines come in many different flavors, depending mostly on the application domain. SketchUp, for example, grew out of the architectural design community who appreciated the easy-to-learn, intuitive interface. Architects could quickly ‘sketch up’ an idea and access a variety of rendering modes suited to their needs. In order to achieve such a flexible and easily understandable user interface, SketchUp relied on polygons as geometric primitives. Precision, complex surfacing, full solid modeling (knowing inside from outside) were not supported initially. Most building designs did not require such tools. Even boolean operations of union, intersection and difference had minimal (polygonal) support and lacked robustness. In contrast, Siemens NX had roots i

Research Zoo CAD Engine Overview May 20, 2025 Research by Mike Farrell & Alyn Rockwood With contributions by Serena Gandhi Geometry Engine 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation: Why Build a CAD Engine? 1.2 A Comparison Between CAD and Game Engines 1.3 CAD Software Performance 2 Core Design Principles and Methodology 2.1 CAD-as-a-Service 2.2 Modelling Paradigms 3 Implementation of Key Features 3.1 Sweeps 3.2 Patterns and Duplication 4 Case Study: GPU-Accelerated Surface-Surface Intersection (SSI) 4.1 Introduction to SSI 4.2 Background: NURBS and Standard SSI Approaches 4.2.1 Why NURBS? Applications of

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