VARKON – CAD system

Last Updated on October 18, 2022

VARKON is a high level development tool for applications in the area of Engineering, Computer Aided Design and Product Modelling.

VARKON can be used as a traditional CAD-system with drafting, modelling and visualisation if you want to but the real power of VARKON is in parametric modelling and CAD applications development.

The software includes interactive parametric modelling in 2D or 3D but also the unique MBS programming language integrated in the graphical environment.

Features include:

• Ideally suited for all types of variational design. Wooden houses, tools for ballbearings, welded steel parts or electrical installations are some of the products currently designed in VARKON using this technique.
• 2D drafting.
• 2D and 3D modeling.
• Sculptured surface modeling.
• Powerful geometric modeller. Basic 3D entities are points, lines, arcs, curves, surfaces, coordinate systems and transformations. Several representations of parametric curves are implemented including rational polynomial, analytical offset and curves on surfaces so called UV-curves. Surface representations include rational polynomial, lofted procedural, analytical offset and a faceted surface for approximations.
• Basic support for trimmed surfaces. Operations include intersects, closest point, silhouette, curvatures, transformation, trimming, export, import and approximation. Basic visualization as well as complex rendering based on OpenGL is included in all versions of the system.
• Animations.
• 7 Datatypes including string, ref and vector.
• Flow control like if, for and goto.
• File I/O.
• Standard library with 350+ functions and procedures.
• Geometric modeling.
• Product modeling (structures, relations and attributes).
• Object oriented database storage and retrieval.
• Graphics output and viewing.
• Import / Export: DXF, IGES, STL and PLT formats.
• Easy to integrate. A VARKON application can communicate using files or pipes and can spawn other processes as well as being spawned itself.

Website: varkon.sourceforge.net
Support: Manual
Developer: The CAD research group
License: GNU GPL

VARKON is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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