i always thought I'd love openscad, being from a more coding background, but it turns out I'm not too fond of it. I eventually used freecad after watching some YouTube videos when I needed to make something.
OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
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Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#92OpenSCAD is amazing for thinking of 3d design as a coding workflow. Here's my minimal intro to it: https://jcarlosroldan.com/post/151/parametric-design-with-op...
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#93For those who are interested. I have been working on a similar CAD Modeler. I think of it as a spiritual successor to OpenSCAD.
It has support for bidirectional modeling (ex: get the height and width of an object and use it later) and multi part workflows to design more complex works.
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#94Discovering OpenSCAD via its official tutorial:
> On the example above, the second cube sits exactly on top of the first cube. This is something that should be avoided as it’s not clear to OpenSCAD whether the two cubes form one object together. This issue can be easily solved by always maintaining a small overlap of about 0.001 - 0.002 between the corresponding objects.
This goes against the whole point of doing parametric design and should be logged as a bug. If the CAD software is unsure whether object spanning [0 to 1] and object spanning [1 to 2] are physically fused, that should be a bug. Mathematically they are fused.
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The awful thing is that you can only export triangles, so you can't make any true curves. If it was capable to true circles it would do everything I have ever needed to make.
I don't understand this. You can make triangles small enough that you can't tell the difference, and define them mathematically in terms of curves..? Isn't this how any rendering will ultimately work? The primitive is triangles.
>You can make triangles small enough that you can't tell the difference, and define them mathematically in terms of curves..?
This doesn't work if you already have a mesh. You need to generate your triangles on demand from the BREP data.
Alternatively you need to use tesselation, but then you need to design your models with tesselation in mind, such as people do in blender.
>Isn't this how any rendering will ultimately work? The primitive is triangles.
Uhm no. 3D printing and CAM do not work with triangles. The slicer and CAM software generate tool paths in gcode.
Importing STEP files into OrcaSlicer/BambuSlicer gives me better quality results and better print speeds than using STL files.
I have personally never understood the love for STL files in the 3D printing community for anything that isn't the result of a blender export. Like, is it really that fun to constantly export different versions of STL files set to different quality levels? Rescaling a print in the slicer is not recommended with STL. You have to re-export the model from blender where the tesselation happens.
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#96I've made a bunch of stuff in OpenSCAD and it can be really nice to work with but... it does have a bunch of weirdnesses like not being to find the size of a compound object, having to micro-manage your objects to avoid the spinning beach ball render, fillets/chamfers/rounded edges/etc. are dark arts, etc. If you're basically sticking simple shapes together or cutting simple shapes out of other shapes, it's fine enou…
Yeah, it has its charms but... Good luck making a filet or a chamfer between two faces whose intersection has a non-trivial placement. Being able to easily reference existing edges and faces for future operations is one of the things that make other CAD so simple.
> Being able to easily reference existing edges and faces for future operations
God, yes. Allegedly the BOSL library has some support for this kind of thing but I've not got around to trying it yet.
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#97What should definitely be mentioned in this series is
BRL-CAD, an Oldie but Goldie in solid modeling: https://brlcad.org/
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#98OpenSCAD is amazing, especially for highly detailed geometry. Fusion360 was crashing when I modelled a honeycomb structure of ~2000 cells, while OpenSCAD easily handeled a similar model.
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#99Nice to see this here. If anyone’s interested, I collected a bunch of resources for it over the years: https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/openscad
Re: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The learning curve required a paradigm shifted in abstraction. This is true! And I think that brute-force simplicity of OpenSCAD is the appeal. I am still ultimately a CAD greenhorn but it got me started, and I don't blame you. But I guess the point I am getting to is, that paradigm shift is where you really want to be. It's certainly where I think most competent programmers who want to really build in 3D should wa…
Thankfully I have been able to do what I want to do without learning the complexity that comes with Build123d etc. Perhaps someday, but I havent had the need to get there thus far. Also: Encapsulation etc was achievable with Python, which is something I already know. PythonSCAD checked all the boxes for me without the learning curve.
Another option in this space is using python to directly generate openscad code, which is a fun exercise to sort of quickly visualize simple recursive algorithms in a 3d world and play with tilings, space filling curves, etc. of course building what amounts to a transpiler will be fun for some, or a distraction, depending on how focused you want to be on the 3d part.
But openscad is a cool and minimal instruction set for such experiments, and doing this in a language with better meta programming support would be even more fun.