alt Hacker NewsBe aware that the way OpenSCAD works (CSG) makes a lot of things difficult compared to "normal" CAD programs. A lot of common operations, such as arbitrary fillets on various edges, are simply hard to express or do.
The more powerful option is something built on the open-source Open Cascade geometry kernel: FreeCAD, cadquery, or build123d. This also gives you interop with the broader CAD ecosystem by enabling you to import and export STEP files. (Your favorite LLM can advise you on or drive these options as well.)
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to be a bit tautological, openscad is nice but only for the things openscad is nice for. I prefer freecad for almost everything except highly parametric shapes. Plus you can do openscad inside of freecad.
To be fair, arbitrary fillets/blends on edges is a hard problem in general for Parasolid/ACIS because you are trying to mutate arbitrary topology, essentially guessing vertices/edges/faces and trying to stitch the back together.
> A lot of common operations, such as arbitrary fillets on various edges, are simply hard to express or do.
As a long-time OpenSCAD user, I don't disagree with you but would also point out that LLMs can now make it very easy to do a lot of this sort of thing while still using OpenSCAD.
I actually find Gemini/agy to be the best of the ones I've tried when it comes to working with OpenSCAD code. And I don't recommend trying to use LLMs to one-shot geometry of anything complicated, but they are great for things like "take this OpenSCAD code and generate a fillet along these edges, abstract the fillet into its own module and make it parametric so I can easily modify the radius".
Granted, selecting a few faces or edges in a GUI CAD program and clicking a button is even easier than that, but only once you've spent a lot of time learning how to use the CAD GUI (which, IMO, are nearly universally very unintuitive until you've spent a lot of time working with them).
Concur. It's worth explaining this, as someone new to CAD would get the impression the various tools in CAD are on even ground, and may assume "I know programming, so OpenSCAD sounds like the right choice". I would love some day for programmatic and/or free/cheap CAD to be competitive, but we're not there. Solidworks, Fusion, Inventor etc still outclass FreeCAD, which outclasses OpenSCAD.
That's because you are thinking in the way you would with conventional cad systems, you are doing your operations sequentially a bit like a sculptor would: take a blank and then remove bits piece by piece. The trick to working effectively with OpenSCAD is to generate what you want, not to iteratively chip away at something.