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by bsdubernerd 1710 days ago
openSCAD has a few operators to highlight/isolate the current syntax block. Have you ever used those?

Working on a project using openscad is not that different than using other cad programs: you should split your model into "modules"/functions and use composition effectively.

I generally find nodal interfaces quite inefficient in general and scale very poorly in every context I've seen them.

The biggest problem with openSCAD for me is that there's no way to "measure" in the preview window. As in: just pick two faces and give me the parallel distance and/or vertex-to-vertex distance. I don't care about precision of the preview, let me double-check!

You have no idea how often this comes up when connecting multiple parts. Computing the distance manually, while possible, is such a nuisance. Every respectable CAD program gives you a distance when clicking on things for this reason. Somehow FreeCAD made this quite unnecessarily clunky that I have to rely on addons and openscad is missing it completely :(
1 comments
ur-whale 1709 days ago
> The biggest problem with openSCAD for me is that there's no way to "measure" in the preview window

I agree, except for the fact that I would go one step further.

OpenSCAD would be amazing if it would let you "interrogate" a piece of geometry returned by a module, something along the lines of:

     - get the AABB of the model
     - cast a ray onto the  odel and get a sorted list of intersections
     - intersect two pieces of geometry and get a polyline out of it
and use the result of these "introspections" as parameters for subsequent manipulation/modification of the object.

If OpenSCAD could do this, it'd be simply amazing.

But I suspect it's hard to do in the current way it's implemented: what I am describing kind of breaks the current OpenSCAD paradigm because it would force injection of data coming from the "geometry stream" into the control parameters of downstream processing nodes.

I don't think the engine is designed to handle this well.

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phkahler 1709 days ago
You might try exporting objects as STL and then link them in Solvespace. Edge builds do support binary STL files and it will identify edge vertices for building additional geometry.
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ur-whale 1709 days ago
Yeah, but then you're not in OpenSCAD anymore, and any subsequent building step has to happen in solvespace, which while it is a nice package, does not have the flexibility of openscad.
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