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Comment by heggy | Hacker News Reader

When would you take OpenSCAD over Blender?

OpenSCAD is really good for parametric designs. One of the first things I designed in OpenSCAD was a bicycle sprocket where you could input how many teeth you wanted, link length, how thick, etc. and OpenSCAD would generate the sprocket according to those parameters. I recall seeing a while back that blender was adding support for this kind of thing so I'm sure it's possible, but it was very intuitive in OpenSCAD.

For any large project I'm sure Blender (or FreeCAD) would be a better choice, but as someone with some programming background just starting out, OpenSCAD feels way more accessible.

I've tried a lot of 3D software over the years, and OpenSCAD has been the one I've been most successful with (along w/ Carbide Create, but I work for that company....)

Currently working on a library which makes the two work together:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

(which is currently quite primitive/basic, and even when fully developed is not likely to be used by anyone else)

Blender wasn't originally designed to be used for CAD type applications. It's possible of course, but you're likely better off with something specifically meant for precision CAD models. Specifically for 3d printing, I don't think blender is ideal.

I think most programmers like OpenSCAD - what better way to make parametric CAD models than by writing code?

My understanding is that with CAD software you can go backwards and have (near?) infinite edit history, in a way you cannot with Blender. Which makes it very, very useful.

A lot of cad software actually has an editable history: you can go back 100 steps and modify a dimension or a step and have the rest of the model updated to take that new dimension into account.

I wouldn’t work with any cad software that didn’t have that ability.

This is called parametric design. Since CAD programs do not operate on meshes, this allows you to e.g. change the dimension on some part and have the rest adjust accordingly.

How well this works depends on the situation, if changing a parameter causes new faces to appear on the object this is usauayvwry difficult to handle, even for commercial CAD programs.

Blender can't do CAD. At least it can't do what you would want to do in a CAD program.

The most important difference is that Blender operates on meshes, CAD programs don't.

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