I haven't used OpenSCAD much beyond combining primitives. Truthfully these organic shapes are more of a use-case for 3D modelling software like Blender rather than CAD, but I'd be keen to hear if you end up giving OpenSCAD a go.

My Bambu A1 mini has been reliable despite the challenging geometry; pretty sure your P2S will work just as well if not better. Good luck!

I was in your shoes about a year ago with an A1 mini, getting into OpenSCAD to make my own keycaps.

If you're getting into OpenSCAD I'd highly recommend getting Belfry ASAP.

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki

I wouldn't really consider using OpenSCAD without it

> In theory, one should be able to use OpenSCAD to come up with fancy surfaces to 3-D print, right?

Yes, but it is painfully slow. Even perforated patterns are quite slow to generate.

I used OpenSCAD to create a map of Manhattan. It shows the live location of subway trains. It was surprisingly easy, I struggled a lot with OnShape and Fusion360 trying to do this because there were too many polygons.

I found that starting with an SVG and extruding from there is perfect in OpenSCAD, but I’m sure I’m underutilizing it a lot.

I wrote a bit about it here if you’re curious https://hackaday.io/project/202488-manhattan-subway-map/deta...

I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt: "figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.

For this case, I'm not exaggerating when I say you would probably have an easier time generating the meshes yourself in python and something like the trimesh library to load the vertices into.

Yes. Claude is surprisingly capable in this area, maybe because the shapes are so simple. Using a slicer in vase mode should make it print quickly too.

Yeah OpenSCAD would have made this a lot easier than the exported-SVG-DXF pipeline

Was going to comment similar. Definitely don't want to use these lamp shades with incandescent bulbs (too hot).

As per drooping over time, perhaps for some of these models the "Persistence of Memory" might apply a nice transform to the shapes.

Good to know about the risk of deformation due to heat from the LED strip. Ours hasn’t visibly warped over the past few months of use, fingers crossed it will last a little while

Try cadquery also!

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

heres an example of OpenSCAD in Clojure

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/designing-3d-printable-objects-wit...

Looks quite fun

FYI FreeCAD also has Python support

And you're saying it would fail with a nozzle smaller than 0.8mm?!

I came here to comment this too - if your surface is entirely mathematically defined, converting that to what your 3D printer speaks is probably easier and gives better results than approximating it with triangles and then converting those triangles to G-code.

I would recommend Onshape to start. The user interface and documentation are stellar and you don't need to install anything to get started.