alt Hacker NewsIt's a lot of work to make models that are useful in real life, but for some things it's worth it because it's sooo nice having 2k of plain text that describes an entire object, and it's even fully parametric, and it even comes with a customizer panel for the parameters, so every model isn't just a model, it's a model generator app, and even has meaningful diffs in git.
The same model in freecad is like 6 megs of zipped xml and realistically not nearly as usefully parametric.
That couple-k of plain text is such a huge deal that it makes all the other difficulty worth it for mechanical/functional stuff.
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OpenSCAD is the only CAD tool I use. I can'd figure out how to operate a graphical 3D software with a 2D GUI so it's just easier to describe things mathematically.
I just wish it had operations for subtractively chamfering, rounding, etc. as doing minkowski() with cones and spheres to achieve that result can be unwieldy.
I find that I'm often making one-offs. I take a part I designed and I need a slight modification for it for some reason.
Fusion is great for that as long as there's not too many parts. But sometimes I'll want a new variant or a series of new variants.
And reaching for python makes that easy.