Re:Fornjot – The world needs another CAD program
by Brian_K_White on Monday March 28, 2022 @02:30AM
(#30827700)
Many. Just one example is fillets.
They don't exist.
It's extremely painful to add fillets to anything by manually designing the geometry. There are a few libraries that try to provide the feature but they are forced to use a pretty inefficient minkowski math that brings your machine to it's knees, and they don't even work that well (can't actually handle every situation). And fillets are not just a nicity you can live without. They are critical all over the place.
The openscad feature set is pretty basic, but there are at least one or two projects that essentially transpile from python to scad. IE, you desribe a model in python with functions that do more powerful things than native scad provides, and it outputs scad code to make that model.
I haven't used those so I can't say more than that about them.
I still use openscad directly for a lot of things and live with it's limitations because to me it's just that huge to be able to check in the model in git and actually diff it and read the file and the diffs directly, and for a whole model to be described in a couple k of human readable text instead of 10 megs of binary or xml.
It's extremely painful to add fillets to anything by manually designing the geometry. There are a few libraries that try to provide the feature but they are forced to use a pretty inefficient minkowski math that brings your machine to it's knees, and they don't even work that well (can't actually handle every situation). And fillets are not just a nicity you can live without. They are critical all over the place.
The openscad feature set is pretty basic, but there are at least one or two projects that essentially transpile from python to scad. IE, you desribe a model in python with functions that do more powerful things than native scad provides, and it outputs scad code to make that model.
I haven't used those so I can't say more than that about them.
I still use openscad directly for a lot of things and live with it's limitations because to me it's just that huge to be able to check in the model in git and actually diff it and read the file and the diffs directly, and for a whole model to be described in a couple k of human readable text instead of 10 megs of binary or xml.