What is Anvil

Anvil is an intuitive, easy-to-use Rust crate for building 3D CAD models. It is built on the principles of:

• consistent and predictable APIs: APIs are consistent between 2D and 3D modelling and between different shapes
• mandatory unit support: Anvil forces you to specify units for all lengths and angles, giving you certainty about the true dimensions of your models
• reliability by design: unit and integration tests exist for almost all public APIs communicating functionality and ensuring reliability

Installation

Anvil is not yet on crates.io, so to install it you need to run

cargo add --git "https://github.com/paramatrix-dev/anvil.git"

or add

anvil = { git = "https://github.com/paramatrix-dev/anvil.git", branch = "main" }

to your Cargo.toml [dependencies] section.

Usage

The two main structs in Anvil are anvil::Part for 3D and anvil::Sketch for 2D models. Both have primitive constructor-structs like anvil::Cuboid for Part or anvil::Rectangle for Sketch which can be further designed with operations like add, subtract, and interface. This is how you would create a 2x2 Lego brick in Anvil:

use anvil::{Axis, Cuboid, Cylinder, IntoLength, Part, point};

let block_width = 16.mm();
let block_height = 9.6.mm();
let stud_height = 11.2.mm() - block_height;
let stud_distance = 8.mm();
let stud_diameter = 4.8.mm();
let thickness = 1.2.mm();
let tube_diameter = 6.5.mm();

let hollow_block_width = block_width - thickness;

let block = Cuboid::from_dim(block_width, block_width, block_height);
let studs = Cylinder::from_diameter(stud_diameter, stud_height)
    .move_to(point!(
        stud_distance / 2.,
        stud_distance / 2.,
        (block_height + stud_height) / 2.
    ))
    .circular_pattern(Axis::<3>::z(), 4);
let inner_block = Cuboid::from_dim(hollow_block_width, hollow_block_width, block_height)
    .move_to(point!(0.m(), 0.m(), thickness * -0.5));
let inner_tube = Cylinder::from_diameter(tube_diameter, block_height - thickness).subtract(
    &Cylinder::from_diameter(tube_diameter - thickness / 2., block_height - thickness),
);

let part = block.add(&studs).subtract(&inner_block).add(&inner_tube);

For more examples, have a look at the /examples directory.

Inspiration

Anvil was originally inspired by the opencascade crate. opencascade-rs was first used as the basis for another project, but we quickly realized a few drawbacks of the crate:

• basic functionality like Clone and PartialEq is missing
• hardly any function, struct, or enum are documented or tested
• the APIs are inconsistent and feel unintuitive

However, the OpenCascade bindings of the adjacent opencascade-sys crate were very useful and used as the backend of Anvil. In the future, we might try to eliminate OpenCascade entirely and implement a custom kernel in Rust.