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Comment by sporp | Hacker News Reader

OpenSCAD! My personal favorite 3D modeling software. Started using it a decade ago since it made sense to me as a coder and I've been too stubborn to use anything else.

Cool stuff, you might already be using this but this roundedcube function has drastically improved the quality of my prints: https://gist.github.com/groovenectar/92174cb1c98c1089347e

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Have you tried using "traditional" modelling tools?

I've been trying to learn how to model using Fusion 360. It's not clicking for me. Probably lack of practice. Wondering if OpenSCAD would be a better solution. Goal is to be able to design useful things for 3d printing..

It depends what you are creating but for all I do Openscad (3d printed components in the lab) is very usable.

SketchUp always felt very intuitive to me. More so than Fusion360, which I think also suffers from being a clunky Electron app that’s trying to do too many things. I prefer FreeCAD to Fusion I think.

It's probably the lazy way, but I found that after I understood just a few primitives (basics of sketching, extruding, constraints, and getting down some of the vocabulary) I can tell ChatGPT what I want to do (and often including screenshots) and it does a pretty spectacular job of filling in the blanks for me.

Tinkercad is what “clicked” for me. I found that it’s very easy to start making simple functional designs, but when you are trying to make something more advanced (pain point: triangles with rounded edges) it’s a bit lacking. Plasticity seems to be the next step in this direction, but it’s pricey.

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