but it has real problems - the language is weird and unfortunate. not anything super fatal, just the obvious product of evolution that would be more cohesive if it were architected wholesale
epsilons are really unfortunate. you have to expect that after getting what you want in the whole, you're going to have to scan over the whole thing and look for cracks or collision where there shouldn't be
performance is quite sad. here you are happy going back and forth between the view and text windows, but as you go on, it starts taking .. minutes.. to update the view once you have a reasonably complicated geometry
high-level operators would also be nice. I made the mistake of using a thread library once, not only did that make my model unrenderable, there was so much noise in the model and the manufacturing process I had to make 3 expensive test prints in sintered nylon to get the fit right. (I'm thinking an annotation on a cylinder that says 'standard 1mm thread')And when something gets too trick, ChatGPT is amazing at writing in it. Often it nails the whole design in the first try, like https://bsky.app/profile/bradfitz.com/post/3maelwomyw22n to mask off certain Raspberry Pi pins to make reassembly of projects easier later.
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.
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 :)
I had the change the height of an entire enclosure to accommodate a taller than anticipated PCB, and simply edited the sketch at the top of my design tree that defined the overall dimensions.
It took about 5 minutes to adjust the odd broken fillet and change some mates in assembly and it was done. No fidgety mouse movements. I actually do a lot of mech design on a laptop with a trackpad, arrow keys for view changes and numeric dimensioning for 95% of everything else.
What.
This makes no sense. This isn't PowerPoint; your holes and cutouts are supposed to be parameterized. How are they even supposed to be at the proper position in the first place?
As a CAD user, this is like e.g. a coder seeing someone write code with global variables everywhere.
I am just starting to learn CAD and FreeCAD - also dabbled a bit in OpenSCAD. But I do know that FreeCAD has Spreadsheets [1] and Configuration Tables [2] which allows you to define your model parameterically and changes values as needed.
How good this is, I don't know yet.
[1] https://wiki.freecad.org/Spreadsheet_Workbench [2] https://wiki.freecad.org/Configuration_Tables
There seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of CAD here. I'm not sure how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.
My favorite thing I’ve printed is a little downsize coupler for the cool shirt system I built for my spec miata. It’s realllly silly & small thing, but it saved me!
Currently I'm playing with a gear library which is part of BOSL2 (https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/gears.scad), to make something to rotate a polariser in my microscope.
The big distinction is that those work implicitly, while OpenSCAD requires you to be implicit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068
OpenSCAD "just works", even on quite limited hardware, and if one has trouble modeling something, well, arriving at a solution is just a matter of learning the appropriate mathematics.
I looked into alternatives and learned about OpenSCAD. The immediate visual feedback makes picking up the language a breeze. Within an hour of downloading I familiarized myself with the language and had manifested my idea into a 3d model
I think that's a perfect example of a use-case where OpenSCAD shines. It's extremely easy to pick up if you have programming experience and it might even be a good thing to learn before moving onto more professional CAD software. From a teaching perspective, being able to have almost immediately-useful output is priceless
Instead it's basically like graphics programming, with a couple of basic primitives, some linear transformations and a bit of set theory. When I do a model a month and get back to previous work, I read a few lines of code and know exactly how I achieved the result.
I also have the opposite experience about understanding previous scripts. Unless it's dead simple I'm usually thinking why the hell did I multiply this thingy by sqrt(3)/2 plus this other thing. Maybe a documentation problem, but it's inescapable that sometimes you need a lot of math for what are trivial constraints in an interactive sketch. A real CAD program will let you roll back to any feature to figure out how it's constructed step by step so there's really nothing to decipher.
It's neat that I can tell the computer what I want in words and then have that object come out of the 3D printer
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that what one can model in 3D is limited by one's ability to mathematically stretch, rotate, and/or arrange spheres, cylinders, and cubes in 3D.
For folks who want "real" (read mutable in normal terms of scope) variables there is a Python-enabled fork (which should become part of the main release presently:
You can use modules to create a semblance of relative measurements but you still cannot do things like “attach this surface of object A to that surface of object B)”. In practice this means that if you want to create something like a spacer or a bracket you can do that easily enough. But if you want to make a part that matches some real world design you are stuck doing a lot of caliper measurements and math to try to create a part that lines up correctly. The you 3D print it and find that you positioned some hole based on its edge and not center and so nothing quite fits.
OpenSCAD is easy to start but difficult to scale because of these limitations and because once you hard-code any measurement you are stuck with it. The “proper” way to do this is to give everything a variable but honestly that makes reasoning about how to line things up even more difficult. “Does base_width include the width of the vertical walls? What about the margin to make the parts fit together?”
I have never been able to understand how things like FreeCAD lay out their UI. TinkerCAD is relatively simple but clearly a lot less powerful. I did try cadquery which solved a lot of OpenSCAD’s issues by having all offsets be relative by default but also introduces a few issues of its own.
One tip I will give about OS: grab a copy of the latest beta/dev release. The renderer is several orders of magnitude faster.
(3D printing a sacrificial gear for a seat position adjustment mechanism)
It also has hulls and minkowski sums, which are powerful once you understand them.
I personally do better with CAD software such as fusion or freecad since my mind doesn't work in the code realm since I have more of a hardware mindset. Translating the picture in my head to code is more difficult than drawing it using the standard CAD set of tools.
My opinion on OpenSCAD is that it is a very useful piece of software which many have used to make some very interesting things. If you have a background in code I recommend giving it a go. I largely view it as "the coder's CAD".
https://github.com/rahulgarg123/openscad-mcp
It’s still strictly worse than what these models are capable of for general-purpose coding, but for simple tasks where precision isn't the bottleneck, it's surprisingly decent.The "aha" moment for me was an image-to-object workflow: found a geometric design on the web --> generated OpenSCAD to match the image --> 3D printed it. Going from seeing a JPEG to holding the physical object in a few hours.
total lack of interactivity.
Ok if you want to generate a couple of cubes, but if you want anything advanced the kernel quickly falls apart
I went from OpenSCAD -> cadquery/build123d -> Zoo/KCL
It still is early days, and it needs some more helper functions but it's really nice having two-way capabilities (not just code -> model, but also the reverse).
Of course having Text-to-model as a first class citizen is also nice.
ai-christianson•1h ago
aeonik•1h ago
bdcravens•1h ago
https://openscad.org/downloads.html#snapshots
starkparker•1h ago
c0nsumer•1h ago
That said, there are often times software gets so stable that not having a new release for years is fine. Maybe this is one of them?
(I'm very new to OpenSCAD so I haven't run into bugs yet... But maybe it's pretty solid?)
crazysim•1h ago
floating-io•1h ago
I use the latest version all the time. The newer renderer ("manifold", IIRC) is much faster, and there are newer facilities that make it possible to build 3MF files containing multiple objects for multi-color printing, though that takes a bit of thought to do correctly.
MattRix•1h ago
To do multi-color printing it’s pretty easy now, just turn on the poorly named feature in preferences called “lazy-unions”. This will make it so that each top level object in your file gets exported as a separate subobject in the 3mf file.
MattRix•1h ago
bdcravens•1h ago