OpenCascade

With this message, I'd like to publish a technical memo that I began writing in 2014 and that has been buried behind tons of other PDFs for many years. This is a comparison of ACIS and OpenCascade. People used to wonder why they should use OpenCascade instead of applying for an expensive ACIS license. To provide a fair answer, I contacted Spatial and requested an evaluation key. They would never have granted me access to their kernel if I hadn't been affiliated with Lobachevsky University, where it didn't matter if we used a paid or open source SDK for our workshop.

So I had to make a few phone calls and listen to a bunch of commercial bullshit before being connected to someone with a technical background. After hearing my story about what I wanted to accomplish with ACIS (I had a lovely realistic legend about using ACIS for bottom-up skinning of turbine blades), they agreed that ACIS could do it and signed me up for their download center. The timer started to tick, and I began trying this and that with the new kernel. That was a lot of fun, but my exercises were largely blind and shallow. At the very least, I gained a basic understanding of what ACIS is and how OpenCascade compares to its elder and more credible brother.

Years passed, and I occasionally came upon an old document in my scattered digital library. After several hours of editing, polishing, and adding new accents, I have a technical document to share with you here: Comparing OpenCascade Kernel with ACIS Modeler.

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