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ur-whaletoday at 2:47 PM3 repliesview on HN

> I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice

As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.

All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.

That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.

For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:

   - Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based

   - Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces

   - Trimming surfaces

   - Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)

   - Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
I might have misunderstood what you're looking to do, but, yeah, digging deeper feels very much like the right thing to do.

Replies

FeepingCreaturetoday at 3:34 PM

(my) fncad doesn't have the querying, but it does have smooth csg! https://fncad.github.io/

Zekiotoday at 3:46 PM

using BOSL2 alleviates most issues I've run into with OpenScad for chamfers and the like, but it is an extra set of functions you need to remember sadly

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2

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hrmtst93837today at 5:18 PM

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