Welcome to Cadalus
A European cooperative alternative to architectural CAD and BIM programs
Planned Apps
CAD
An architectural CAD program, designed to get floorplans and blueprints as quickly as possible, including automatic 3D mockups based on the floorplans.
BIM
An extensible BIM program letting you model and manage every step.
Procurement management
A program to manage tendering, awarding and contract execution.
Why Cadalus?
Owned by you & democratic
As a european co‑op, you don't just buy a license of Cadalus, you partially own it. This means you get a say in how the software is developed and maintained, ensuring it meets your needs and the needs of the community.
Easy to wrap your head around
Cadalus will be designed with state‑of‑the‑art UX in mind, alleviating many 'WTF' moments from your daily life.
Highest‑quality output
Cadalus will take great care in keeping your documents as readable and beautiful as possible. It also will be integrated with Blender, allowing for stunningly realistic renders.
Compatible with your existing workflows
Each stage of Cadalus will be designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to your projects.
Open source
Cadalus will be open source, allowing you to make changes to how it works yourself, stick to older versions, or even fork it if you want to go in a different direction.
Proudly European
Cadalus will be entirely EU‑based and use European software where applicable. This ensures the highest levels of privacy, avoids strange tariffs, and supports the local economy.
Roadmap
Preliminary work
Before any development can start, a lot of preliminary work needs to be done. This includes research into the problem space, interviews with architects, engineers and builders, and extensive planning. It also includes incorporation, and sorting of financing. This stage is already underway and is yielding documents like a finance plan for this and the following stages, SWOT analyses, and a draft for the articles of association. This work is currently being done by Leo Wattenberg, the initiator of the project.
Quick sketches and floorplans
Being able to quickly generate sketches and floorplans is the core feature. Plans should be easy and fast to create, with the program intelligently layouting the document to create a high-quality output which can be used by builders without further tweaking. Additionally, the output of this program should be interoperable with existing software, so that using Cadalus at this stage remains useful in production. This stage would require two people to work on Cadalus.
Sketch to 3D geometry
CAD sketches by definition contain all measurements necessary to construct a 3D environment. This process should happen automatically (perhaps: in the background), to create a fast check with a three-dimensional reality and quickly spot impossibilities. Given that this work is now 'real CAD' work, a full team is required here: Product owner, designer, 3x developers and a QA.
Geometry to visualizations
Once 3D geometry exists, the European open source program Blender can take over and do PBR materials, lighting, animation and rendering. Blender has been doing massive strides recently, and outperforms many commercial applications already. Cadalus would provide a method to integrate with Blender to create high-quality visualizations of the 3D geometry. The work on Cadalus at this stage would include improving the CAD workflows, and providing meaningful base assets for visualizations. The aforementioned 6-people team would be sufficient to get this stage done, though given the parallelization of some of this work, a larger team of up to 15 people may be appropriate (depending on funding).
A fully-fledged BIM
Going from a CAD to a BIM certainly is a longer process, but ultimately only a problem of data input and features which perform calculations based on that data. That is to say, it's all in the realm of possibility. What features would need to be implemented with what priority would be up to the AEC community. The team size here would grow appropriately with the people, though likely will remain comparatively lean as building new features tends to be easier than maintaining ancient, crusty code found in other CAD software.
Continuous development
Once the initial stages are done, the project enters the fairly unexciting stage of just maintaining a good tool. This means supporting additional use cases, fixing bugs, ensuring compatibility with new hardware and software, and ensuring that the software remains usable and useful for the AEC community.
Join Cadalus
At the moment, Cadalus is still looking for the inital partners to found the company. If you'd like to be one of the co-founders / founding members, please contact me.
The Cadalus project has been initiated by Leo Wattenberg, who previously worked on the Audacity audio editor for 4 years. The task of his there was similar to what he envisions for Cadalus: creating a free and open source alternative to proprietary software which is easy to use, reliable and eventually to surpass proprietary software in terms of features and user experience.
If created, Cadalus would likely be licensed GPLv3.
Impressum