Varkon

Varkon

VARKON is a CAD-Computer Program which enables users to produce drafts, models and visualizations of three-dimensional objects.
Furthermore with VARKON a user is able to do parametric modelling and CAD application development.

Originally VARKON was developed between 1984 and 1986 at the University of Linköping in Sweden by a group lead by Dr. Johan Kjellander.

In 1985 Dr. Johan Kjellander founded Microform and Varkon became a commercial product which it remained until the year 2000, when it was released under the GNU/GPL license.

In august 2007 the VARKON project was relocated to SourceForge.

VARKON is written in ANSI portable C and able to run on many different Operating Systems, including Windows and Linux.

Variational Design

VARKON is suited for all types of variational design. Using VARKON with its ability to handle geometry as
well as other features and store the result in a well-structured and object oriented manner it is possible to produce much more information than paper drawings.

Cost estimations, bill of materials and different forms of manufacturing data are usually created automatically in VARKON applications.

Integration

A VARKON application can communicate using files or pipes and can spawn other processes as well as being spawned itself. Using this
technique a user can either let a VARKON application be on top and control other systems or the user can use other systems to control VARKON.

Varkon also includes an ODBC API for communication with commercial databases.

3-D Modelling

Basic 3D entities used in Varkon 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 was introduced in Varkon version 1.19.
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.

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See Also

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