Riglab

Riglab is a browser CAD sandbox for wearable-creature mechanisms: draw PVC pipe onto a wearer silhouette in a quad-view workspace, hinge it together, and drag the rig around to see whether it binds before anything gets cut. It handles forces (ropes, elastics, bowden cables), live balance over the pack frame, bend schedules, and a bill of materials, all client-side on a hand-rolled XPBD solver. Claude Fable wrote nearly all of it in a bit over a day, with me steering.

At this point the software is mature and has done its job. The mechanisms for the Burning Man raptor were proven here, and the day-to-day drawing of the creature now happens in pvc-builder, its companion tool, so new feature work has tapered off. The physical build is about 75 percent done: frame glued, head in progress.

The full story (where the idea came from, the solver bake-off, and what two days of vibe-coding cost) is in the writeup: