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Comment by dcminter | Hacker News Reader

Have you played around with OpenSCAD? That comes from the programmatic direction.

As a novice it does seem to me that there's room for an open source CAD tool that offers a bridge between the two approaches. For what it's worth my opinions on a few tools:

• SolveSpace - solid, but a bit limited in its capabilities (e.g. no fillets or chamfers)

• FreeCAD - very powerful but almost unusably buggy (others seem to have had better experiences)

• OpenSCAD - very powerful but requires coding for everything

Then there are various non-3D cad tools and a few online ones (of which I've got the most use out of TinkerCAD which is easy to use because it is very limited in its capabilities)

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OpenSCAD is just a generator.

You cannot query generated or imported geometry in any way. Not even calculate bounding box which can come handy if you want to place something on top of your model etc..

Equally big problem is schizma between modules and functions. Functions can't draw anything but can return values. Modules can draw but can't return anything. So you cannot even calculate the bounding box (or anything similar) yourself even without STL import.

CadQuery on the other can do queries.. give me bounding box. give me a second face parallel with XY from this point in direction of +Z.

Btw. FreeCAD bugginess realy varies. I have had a much better experience with a package built from master on Gentoo and Nix than with the stable appimage.

OpenSCAD lacks a constraint solver so cannot, IMO, be called "very powerful".

It is great if your design consists of boolean operations of several independent components. But many designs require complex interdependent relationships between the component geometries. Your OpenSCAD file will begin to contain a lot of trigonometry, projections, linear solves, etc. Eventually you will need a nonlinear solver...

I really enjoyed writing OpenSCAD code when it was suitable, though. Now I want to learn if there are any code-based constraint-based CAD packages.

How does blender not meet these needs?

Blender is very very good for animation and 3d graphics. But it is not designed well for engineering and cad. It certainly can be used but many of the tooling is not designed for 3d printed parts for example.

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