Comment by sheepscreek
6 months ago
OpenSCAD is genuinely great for the right kind of user. If you’re familiar with CSS and have experience with animations in the past, you already possess the skills to be productive with OpenSCAD. In my opinion, the most challenging aspect is getting accustomed to the disconnect between visualizing something and manipulating it, as it’s done through code.
I really liked OpenSCAD as a concept, but when I started designing things that had a fair bit of complexity the rendering engine really shit the bed. This was a powerful rig as well.
I used OpenSCAD a long time ago because it felt very natural having spent a lot of time with POVray as a teen.
But I found it to be very difficult to design parts with specific dimensions that were needed to line up with objects in the real world.
In FreeCAD (/Solidworks/Onshape/solvespace/etc.) it's easy to just create a logical sketch of your part, fix the require dimensions, angles, symmetries, etc and it solves for the geometry.
Similar situation here, ex POVray. After years of managing ME's on Solidworks, I still prefer OpenSCAD to anything else because it's cross-platform, small, always available, and frequently modeling a single part in isolation or a small number of parts in proximity is adequate to solve a problem. It really doesn't scale to complex projects yet. No measurement tools, no drawing tools are the kickers. Animation is meh, better to go to Blender for anything nontrivial. Intrigued by but haven't really given a fair go to SolveSpace. https://solvespace.com/