i tried “apples” and got lots of nuts-and-bolts models?

edit: looks like the data is trained from machinery parts. impressive regardless, but i’d add that to the lander

I tried "DHO804" (a popular oscilloscope that has printable accessories), got all screws.

Ok too niche, except that's exactly the use-case as I see it so if that's too niche then what good is it? Whatever call it pre-alpha poc and move on...

Tried "grommet", got all finger rings. Closer but not close enough to be useful. It wasn't a mix of ringular-shaped objects including grommets, and grommets aren't only round either. None of the rings were even slightly grommet shaped, purely tori and belts, some with add-ons and cut-outs.

Perhaps it needs a couple orders of magnitude more input samples before it becomes useful. And by "useful" I do mean even just as a proof of concept, because I don't see any concept proven here.

There's a pretty big bias for mechanical engineering components in the dataset- very few organic forms. It's one of the limitations we call out in the dataset card.

There are a few though! Try "dog" or "cookie cutter" for example.

It's CAD. Is there a legitimate reason to use that to engineer a dog? Doesn't make sense to me.

The initial ABC dataset is from public Onshape files -- clearly some people had a reason to design a dog model parametrically!

id guess for 3d printing.

not the best tool for the job of making something organically shaped, but maybe they also wanted to run some aerodynamics tests on it?

It's CAD. Doesn't make sense to engineer an apple...

Fruit picking is a thing. You may want to 3D print some everlasting apples for tests.

I've just now done exactly this. Model something (not an apple) not because I want to print it, but because I need to import it into CAD to check clearances etc. around it. I can abolsutely imagine modelling different sized apples if I was building an apple sorting machine.

I do this all the time when working with stuff that is either perishable or expensive. I just print a 3D model of it and use that as a stand in for the real thing until I have it working.

CAD is a 3D modeling tool.

its not the only one, and other tools are better suited for something like an apple. you can still post-process it to get it right sized for a printer

Oh come on, a nice 3D model of parametric apples in OpenSCAD would be so neat to have.

I think an apple would not be stored in a CAD format like IGES or STEP but rather in OBJ, USD, FBX etc.

I.e. it would not be in dataset because the use cases for 3D apples are outside of typical use cases where people resort to CAD software.