Archiyou docs

# What and why Archiyou?

Archiyou is an online platform for open parametric design. In some ways it's just a tool 📐🚀: It offers a free online way to learn modeling, design, re-use and share 3D models. 👥 We hope that the easy access makes it easier to design collaboratively, build on the work of others and share back. 👁 The vision behind Archiyou is to democratize design knowledge 🌈.

# Archiyou as a tool

There are a lot of 3d modeling tools: Blender (opens new window), Rhino3D (opens new window), CadQuery (opens new window), OnShape (opens new window), Solidworks (opens new window), Shapr3D (opens new window), FreeCAD (opens new window), SketchUp (opens new window), Houdini (opens new window) and Autodesk's Revit (opens new window), Fusion360 (opens new window) among many others.

Most have been around a long time and are great 💘. So why then Archiyou? Here are some features that we feel are missing in existing tools, but are or will be in Archiyou:

  • 🌎 Open online design: The web is the playground to design with and for the world. That means building on the works of others, sharing back and connecting to processes that go beyond (like production, evaluation, simulation)
  • 🐇 Free: the core of Archiyou will always be free
  • 💻 An API for Shapes: At its base Archiyou is just a scripting library to create shapes with code. It is not only about modeling but making all kinds of applications with geometry
  • 💪 Can do most stuff others can
  • 🌐 Plugged in design: The things you make in Archiyou are online and easy to connect to everywhere else. You can import everything from the web, but also export elsewhere. Your script is a URL, a model, the design-intelligence, the database and online API.
  • 🔓 Open Source: We will release the core library as open source, so you can always run your scripts and extend their capabilities

# Archiyou as a vision and platform

See our Blog (opens new window) for more information. As a platform and vision we are focused on these things.

  • 💾 Design-knowledge as information: Design is not just pretty model: it describes the processes of beauty, utility, choices, customizability and (re)making. We want to capture and open up this knowledge for everyone.
  • 📚 Open Design Library: Bring together the best design models and make them easily available
  • 💞 Outcome based design: With its connectiveness designs can be evaluated directly for CO2, costs and more

# Inspired and/or powered by

Archiyou is inspired and powered by the following projects:

# Others to check out

The Archiyou ecosystem →