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Comment by triclops200 | Hacker News Reader

I went through the same exact issue with FreeCAD and eventually ended up using http://solvespace.com/index.pl It's FOSS and works really well. Isn't as fully featured as Fusion360, but I personally love its interface

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I just found that linked in r/3dprinting last night on a discussion about the Autodesk's new Fusion 360 bullshit, it's on my list to try out!

If SolveSpace doesn't pan out for me I'll try OpenSCAD next, but I gather there are some issues with that modeling approach where fillets/chamfers are much more challenging to create than they are in a graphical modeller.

With OpenSCAD, you don't have fillets as part of the language, but you can do chamfers or machinable parts easily using the minkowski sum operation, which basically places an object of your choice on every point along the surface of another object. I've used this to do insets and outsets, radiused corners, and all sorts of other funky stuff.

However, if you want that sort of operations you would probably be better off with cadquery, which is basically the engine behind FreeCAD, with a really powerful Python interface. It has native support for face operations like fillets.

No idea if I'm doing something wrong, but minkowski operations seem to cause OpenSCAD's preview and rendering to become extremely slow real quick, on the order of minutes for models with several such parts.

minkowski and hull operate on every vertex in your object mesh - this means they need to a) convert the solid into a mesh and b) do math for every combination of vertices in said mesh. That's O(n^2) operations for objects of complexity n. This means that they are much slower than csg operations (that operate on the underlying geometry rather than the mesh). They are definitely the slowest (but most powerful) operators in OpenSCAD. If you're doing something like minkowski-adding a sphere to a complex shape, use $fn=(some low number) on the sphere to reduce face count and speed things up initially while you're hacking around, then increase it again before final render.

When using SolveSpace, please build from source or get it from the snap store. The last official release is almost 4 years old. Its come pretty far since then.

Thank you! I did not realize that the release is so far behind. I've mentioned this on the SolveSpace Reddit sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace/comments/iun270/heads_up...

Ah fun, that probably means I have to use this in Windows because I don't think Apple will let me build from source.

Just to check if any Mac developers wander into the comments - is it possible to build and run software on Mojave without an Apple Developer subscription, or is that now an absolute requirement due to the notarization system?

Just to let you know, I oped a Reddit sub for solvespace: https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace/

It's fairly new, so currently has very little traffic. But if you've got good questions, can give good answers, or have interesting projects to share it would be great to have you subscribe.

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