alt Hacker NewsJust started using OpenSCAD recently and love it. While most CAD tools have a million features to learn, OpenSCAD is completely described by a cheat sheet you could print on a piece of A4 (like most programming languages).
I would really recommend using the git master than the latest release though. The last release was 2021 but they are still actively working on it and it's much faster now.
I also have to recommend the BOSL2 library which means you don't have to implement all of those one million features from typical CAD software yourself. Its definitely got a bit of a learning curve but the fact that you can always default back to vanilla OpenSCAD and that you can actually see how stuff is implemented makes it much more satisfying to me to learn than learning what all the traditional CAD GUI buttons do.
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> I would really recommend using the git master than the latest release though.
This. The master version is so much further ahead of the last tagged version. The render time can be orders of magnitude faster for more complex models.
Agree but you quickly run into its limitations. Like if you 3d print something, you need to eliminate when possible sharp edges. That's not fun to do with OpenSCAD.
BOSL2 is SO nice and powerful, can also highly recommend it! :)
OpenSCAD isn't a CAD tool, IMO. It does nothing at all to aid your design. It barely even helps describe it in any abstract way.
It is a useful tool for programmatically describing either very simple or heavily geometric objects. For everything else it's the wrong tool.
Commenting off of you since I wrote all of this and then realized it's basically exactly what you're saying. But to +1 everything you just said in my own words:
I love OpenSCAD. I've been 3D printing for a while, but I never really got to a place where I could design interesting parts until I started to get the precision of doing models in code. Sometimes it is slower, for sure.
Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it. The input devices lack precision for that kind of task, and having to repeat the operation dozens of times (or bulk select) gave me a terrible sinking feeling, and I'd often just step away and give up on the design at that point out of frustration. I try to approach everything in OpensSCAD in a way that means I never have to experience that feeling again.
I will also say that doing everything from scratch in OpenSCAD would be it's own special kind of hell. Libraries like [BOSL2](https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2) provide a good set of core ideas and preferences that help set you on a good path. A good example: BOSL2 shapes tend to have a "center origin" by default, which is different than the OpenSCAD default, but makes doing transforms later way easier.
Anyway, happy to see OpenSCAD getting some attention here :)