Comment by the__alchemist

21 hours ago

Note: This is probably a dead-end; it is not on the same level as SolidWorks, Fusion etc.

Or Blender, pen and paper, bag of LEGO, etc. Text in context of geometric object is more or less an abstract classification tool, barely a descriptive one.

Everyone knows what a `dice` is. But that's a taxonomical label, not a definition of one. Anyone reading this can probably draw a representative `dice` using only standard stationery supplies in under a minute. Now describe one in English with such rigor and precision that it readily translates to a .gcode file to be printed. That requires a good amount of useful neurodivergence to pull off at all.

  • The great thing about OpenSCAD is that one can model anything which one can describe using mathematics and cubes, cylinders, spheres, and transformations/relocations of same.

    The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that what one can model is bounded by one's fluency with mathematics and one's ability to place and transform cubes, cylinders, and spheres.

I wouldn't call a FOSS project that you compare to some 2,620 USD/year software a dead-end. It's good enough for simple modeling, especially when it comes to scripting, and has been for 10 years already.

You're probably right, OpenSCAD seems to be limited both in speed and in exactness of the surfaces.

However purely programmatic interface allows doing surprising things which might be hard to achieve with a mouse.

  • If you're using one of the old stable builds, then the newer nightly builds are markedly faster --- hopefully there will be a new stable release presently.