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I prefer the style of OpenSCAD but I’ve found that there are certain things that the software just is either really hard to achieve or incapable of doing entire
by SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
I prefer the style of OpenSCAD but I’ve found that there are certain things that the software just is either really hard to achieve or incapable of doing entirely. One recent example is that I was designing a part for injection molding and I needed to add a draft angle to the part. This seemingly simple operation is rather trivial to do in FreeCAD and Fusion 360. It is not at all trivial in OpenSCAD.
Another example of OpenSCAD’s limitations is the render time for parts produced by boolean operations which this change purportedly helps a lot with. But there is also still not a guarantee that the output of those boolean operations is actually a manifold object. Slicers these days are actually quite good at repairing geometry but even with a moderately complex part produced by boolean operations (in my case it was often one that required subtraction of cylinders across multiple pieces of an object) I found OpenSCAD’s output to produce some bizarre issues with geometry that even the slicer could not repair very well.
I too like OpenSCAD the best and often find myself more productive in it than other pieces of software, especially for simple models. But for complex models it can’t really hold up to the more traditional parametric modeling software (yet)
- alpaca128 5y agoI only experienced issues with OpenSCADs STLs if I used `difference()` with overlapping surfaces (aka when it flickers in the preview). Even then the slicer's repair feature fixed it. For me the main limitation in OpenSCAD is the UI: distance labels along the XYZ axes are unreadable when they overlap with a surface, transparency only works with one object at a time. Also I'd love highlighted edges in the preview & split view, it would make alignment of parts so much easier. Still I'm so much more productive in it than e.g. FreeCAD because I have most of what I need memorized and the rest can be looked up on the one-page cheatsheet.