Comment by jyap
8 days ago
There’s not many free as in open source alternatives out there. There’s traditional CAD such as Fusion 360 which gives you a limited amount of designs and is “free” for non-commercial use.
So then under the open source, own your designs umbrella you have stuff like FreeCAD which is similar to traditional CAD which means you have a learning curve.
OpenSCAD is programmatic which suits someone with a software engineering background. Plus being free in the sense of owning your designs.
> OpenSCAD is programmatic which suits someone with a software engineering background
Perfect. I already knew how to code, so it was just a question of minutes to learn the basic stuff of the language and then I could just do what I wanted.
Fusion360, AutoCAD and organic modeling tools like Blender you need to learn several concepts, keybindings, navigating through menus, panels, tabs, workspaces, etc, etc. So many things _before_ doing something. In OpenSCAD you can even code in the text editor you're already familiar and then use it only to render the object (which can also be done through CLI!)