I have been using OpenSCAD to create cool geometric designs for 3D printing on fabric, with great results. The functional model is likely unfamiliar to most developers, but I have found that I can be efficient and productive with it.
Be aware that the way OpenSCAD works (CSG) makes a lot of things difficult compared to "normal" CAD programs. A lot of common operations, such as arbitrary fillets on various edges, are simply hard to express or do.
The more powerful option is something built on the open-source Open Cascade geometry kernel: FreeCAD, cadquery, or build123d. This also gives you interop with the broader CAD ecosystem by enabling you to import and export STEP files. (Your favorite LLM can advise you on or drive these options as well.)
That's because you are thinking in the way you would with conventional cad systems, you are doing your operations sequentially a bit like a sculptor would: take a blank and then remove bits piece by piece. The trick to working effectively with OpenSCAD is to generate what you want, not to iteratively chip away at something.
to be a bit tautological, openscad is nice but only for the things openscad is nice for. I prefer freecad for almost everything except highly parametric shapes. Plus you can do openscad inside of freecad.
The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes modeling using cubes, spheres, cylinders, and placing or stretching them mathematically easy.
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's capabilities in it are bounded by one's fluency in using math to place or stretch cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
i did ton of projects in open scad in the past (8+yrs ago), even having access to freecad and solidworks. I was even sending patches to some 2d features on freecad.
but what made me use scad was reliability. i knew the time i put writting in vim would translate (heh) into a viable stl file i could send to manufacturing. while with both other options half the time was dealing with bugs and crashes and bad exports.
but how did i miss some convenience tools indeed. most could be solved with opensource methods (e.g. bevel, joiners with easing, threads)
Concur. It's worth explaining this, as someone new to CAD would get the impression the various tools in CAD are on even ground, and may assume "I know programming, so OpenSCAD sounds like the right choice". I would love some day for programmatic and/or free/cheap CAD to be competitive, but we're not there. Solidworks, Fusion, Inventor etc still outclass FreeCAD, which outclasses OpenSCAD.
I agree with your ordering of the various programs out there but FreeCAD 26.3 is now available as a release candidate with a wonderful collection of improvements. I'd think for many people, FreeCAD is now "good enough" for a lot of things. I'm building a virtual pinball cabinet and the whole thing is modeled in FreeCAD.
Not an OpenCascade wrapper, it's based off my own experimental BREP geometry kernel. So, fillets/chamfers work, booleans works fairly robustly, surfacing, sheet metal, etc all works decently, it exports STEP AP242 by default.
Haven't had time to get the AIs to write a more up to date documentation and polish the language server. Not the easiest thing to use right now, so, using it through Codex/Claude Code or CLI is probably the easiest way to get started.
Still working on the webUI currently, in case someone want to DIY the UI. Note that the WASM compilation path is still unoptimized and way slower than the RyuJIT C# compilation though.
Not even two years ago writing your own BREP kernel was considered to be out of reach for even the most determined dedicated hardcore engineering teams that weren't extremely well funded. Now, it seems tractable and may finally get us out of the dependence on proprietary kernels that has plagued this industry for decades.
Eventually, someone will note that its programming model limits variables and so forth --- for folks who want a more traditional language choice there are a number of options, notably for Python:
I love OpenSCAD. Have been a power user for years. It's so great asking LLMs to make 3d models in openscad.
I made a rust-implementation of openscad called openrscad (https://openrscad.com). It still has some rough edges, but runs quite fast both on desktop and in the browser
The one you want is the experimental build, it is way faster to the point that 'preview mode' should be disabled. I use OpenSCAD a lot, it ties right into my workflow and plays nice with versioning and re-using modules from one project to another. Over time I've built up a nice library of parts that I can quickly customize for whatever it is that I'm building. Latest project: pick-and-place machine modification for Prusa MK3 3D printers (an interesting challenge, to put it mildly), now working on some robotics stuff.
The most important thing about OpenSCAD for programmers to remember is that it looks as if you are programming but really you are describing geometry and objects so things like variables and such do not quite work in the way you would expect from a programmers point of view.
> The most important thing about OpenSCAD for programmers to remember is that it looks as if you are programming but really you are describing geometry and objects so things like variables and such do not quite work in the way you would expect from a programmers point of view.
To put it another way, it's a purely functional language in a very strict way that takes some getting used to.
Note that the current release version is very old, I strongly recommend downloading the nightly version and turning on the manifold geometry solver in settings as it's much faster.
It would be interesting to see a head to head comparison of frontier LLMs building models with OpenSCAD, Blender scripting, and Fusion MCP. My intuition would be that blender winds up the best for the immediate result due to training data prevalence and RL tuning, but the concise nature of OpenSCAD could help.
I'll have to add this to my backlog of experiments to try when I have unused tokens near a reset...
Blender gives you a mesh that isn't parameterized. Not particularly useful for making dimensional changes outside of eyeballing everything. An LLM isn't going to reliably hit your dimension targets so tweaks will be necessary.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "immediate result", if you need to edit the generated model by hand it will be hard to beat having the model and timeline available in Fusion after using Fusion MCP.
If you just need to tweak the dimensions in the script, or are satisfied with describing the changes to the LLM and having it modify the script, there isn't much difference in practice between a generated OpenSCAD script and a Blender python script.
LLMs are excellent at building OpenSCAD models. The tutorial (written in the before-times) will help understanding of the key concepts of OpenSCAD: primitives, transformations, and constructive solid geometry.
OpenSCAD is amazing for those who know nothing about 3D but know about programming.
I bought a 3D printer (which is basically simpler and more reliable than a 2D inkjet printer by now: it's send the file, put the filament, and 3D print and it just works) recently and already fixed shitload of stuff around the house with 3D printed parts.
I even did "print in place" pieces where you add a pause a a certain layer, insert "stuff" (like say a 3D metal angle) into your print, then finish your print. Effectively creating parts that are both plastic and metal.
Now the language itself in OpenSCAD is kinda really bad: you can define variables inside of other functions and then use them everywhere. You can redefine already defined variables and you'll get zero warning. The language itself is really pretty WTF.
But you get modelling for free as a programmer. And LLMs are okay'ish at it for simple stuff.
I'd recommend people to use the BOSL2 library for OpenSCAD:
As a programmer, I second this. Systems like Blender are inscrutable to me, but in OpenSCAD I just write some loops. I get what I want and it's easy to tweak.
The nightly builds for this are so much better. When are they going to merge the nightlies into a new mainline release? The last one showing 2021 isn't the best look...
Check out my repos of OpenSCAD objects at https://github.com/jeffbarr/OpenSCADObjects and Truchet Tilings at https://github.com/jeffbarr/TruchetTilings .
My code kind of looks like the C that I wrote in the 1980s, with lots of braces and careful indenting -- not sure if that is a bug or a feature.
As another commenter noted, use the latest nightly build for best results.
The more powerful option is something built on the open-source Open Cascade geometry kernel: FreeCAD, cadquery, or build123d. This also gives you interop with the broader CAD ecosystem by enabling you to import and export STEP files. (Your favorite LLM can advise you on or drive these options as well.)
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's capabilities in it are bounded by one's fluency in using math to place or stretch cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
but what made me use scad was reliability. i knew the time i put writting in vim would translate (heh) into a viable stl file i could send to manufacturing. while with both other options half the time was dealing with bugs and crashes and bad exports.
but how did i miss some convenience tools indeed. most could be solved with opensource methods (e.g. bevel, joiners with easing, threads)
Mango Jelly's overview of some of the biggest new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdTyFHY-5r4
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Aetheris/
Not an OpenCascade wrapper, it's based off my own experimental BREP geometry kernel. So, fillets/chamfers work, booleans works fairly robustly, surfacing, sheet metal, etc all works decently, it exports STEP AP242 by default.
Haven't had time to get the AIs to write a more up to date documentation and polish the language server. Not the easiest thing to use right now, so, using it through Codex/Claude Code or CLI is probably the easiest way to get started.
Still working on the webUI currently, in case someone want to DIY the UI. Note that the WASM compilation path is still unoptimized and way slower than the RyuJIT C# compilation though.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/helioscad
As noted, use the Nightly builds from: https://openscad.org/downloads.html#snapshots
When working with kids, it's well worth keeping: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ in mind, or for folks who like to draw connections: https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
Eventually, someone will note that its programming model limits variables and so forth --- for folks who want a more traditional language choice there are a number of options, notably for Python:
https://pythonscad.org/
I made a rust-implementation of openscad called openrscad (https://openrscad.com). It still has some rough edges, but runs quite fast both on desktop and in the browser
The most important thing about OpenSCAD for programmers to remember is that it looks as if you are programming but really you are describing geometry and objects so things like variables and such do not quite work in the way you would expect from a programmers point of view.
To put it another way, it's a purely functional language in a very strict way that takes some getting used to.
I'll have to add this to my backlog of experiments to try when I have unused tokens near a reset...
If you just need to tweak the dimensions in the script, or are satisfied with describing the changes to the LLM and having it modify the script, there isn't much difference in practice between a generated OpenSCAD script and a Blender python script.
It's not as bad as it looks, it's all automatic except adding colors which takes about 2 minutes.
https://github.com/joewalnes/toybrick
LLMs are excellent at building OpenSCAD models. The tutorial (written in the before-times) will help understanding of the key concepts of OpenSCAD: primitives, transformations, and constructive solid geometry.
I bought a 3D printer (which is basically simpler and more reliable than a 2D inkjet printer by now: it's send the file, put the filament, and 3D print and it just works) recently and already fixed shitload of stuff around the house with 3D printed parts.
I even did "print in place" pieces where you add a pause a a certain layer, insert "stuff" (like say a 3D metal angle) into your print, then finish your print. Effectively creating parts that are both plastic and metal.
Now the language itself in OpenSCAD is kinda really bad: you can define variables inside of other functions and then use them everywhere. You can redefine already defined variables and you'll get zero warning. The language itself is really pretty WTF.
But you get modelling for free as a programmer. And LLMs are okay'ish at it for simple stuff.
I'd recommend people to use the BOSL2 library for OpenSCAD:
https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki
It's really not hard.
If you love programming and like to DIY stuff around the house, buying a 3D printer and learning some OpenSCAD is a no-brainer.
OpenSCAD ain't the only option: many people like Fusion (for example). But as I'm a dev, OpenSCAD just feels natural to me.