[Palomides]

thinking in terms of composing 3d objects and their positions is 90% of doing CAD already, if you can do that, you can reproduce any of the objects in OP with 15 minutes of learning the tool

seriously, I think people overestimate how hard basic CAD work is

[throwgfgfd25]

> seriously, I think people overestimate how hard basic CAD work is

I think this is one of those things that programmers overestimate worse than non-programmers, too. To the point that they reject CAD UIs too early and get themselves stuck in often rather limiting code-CAD environments, because they never get to learn how parametric GUI CAD works.

This belief that only code can be intuitively parametric is obviously not something that non-programmers suffer from.

I think code-CAD has many benefits (though the idea of the various LLM-to-OpenSCAD tools out there makes me shudder; this is the worst possible combination of obscure knowledge-bases).

But just a trivial amount of time learning even FreeCAD (the least-intuitive CAD package, pretty unambiguously) unlocks so much potential.

[iancmceachern]

Yeah, if you architect your part right, which takes experience.

For folks that don't belive us, check out "speed modeling"

[throwgfgfd25]

It does take experience but mostly it takes a little analysis.

I'm still really quite green at CAD; I've come to it late in life and I only make relatively simple things, perhaps; only simple mechanisms.

But when I look at people getting stuck and asking for help in CAD groups it so often comes down to the knock-on effects of very early mistakes, like squandering the benefits of the base planes by choosing the wrong initial orientation, muddling through with primitives when an extrusion of a sketch would do the job, or making a series of complex circular pockets when a single revolve could have done it better.

Basic familiarity with a few principles and their expression in CAD, and a little study of existing objects gets you a long way.

It interests me that programmers are willing to learn the expressive nuances of individual languages or libraries or methodologies, but as soon as it comes to GUI CAD they dismiss the whole thing as too hard or too obscure. The excitement around LLM text-to-CAD seems emblematic of this; as if the wrong conclusions about GUI interfaces have been drawn from bad experiences of dev GUIs.

[iancmceachern]

Totally

Asking me or folks that do what I do to create a hardware product that way would be like asking a sculptor to sit down and write NC code for a marble router to cut out the sculpture they see in their minds eye.

When we're using these tools, Solidworks in my case, we're not just clicking with the mouse. We're typing complex commands, creating and using variables, creating scripts and macros, we often use gaming mice with many buttons mapped to complex hockey's, etc.

The graphics interface is just part of it, the part where it shows us 3d geometry so we can put it into our minds eye, and a way to tell the computer what geometry we are talking about before we execute work using what I described above.

Most people don't get it, if you do you do. You do.