Inspired by MaskedRetriever‘s last few Thingiverse blog posts on OpenSCAD I tried it out again. Well, to be fair, I’ve been trying Tony Buser’s CloudSCAD. I’ll get around to actually installing OpenSCAD, but playing with CloudSCAD is so dang easy. It is limited by the power1 of my netbook.
I have always enjoyed the ease and immediacy of Sketchup. Complex objects and forms are easy. Amusingly, sometimes the smaller simpler bits can be more difficult to tame. 2 But, CloudSCAD does appeal to my programmer/hacker nature.
In any case, I’ve managed to conjure simple forms – spheres, cubes, boxes, cylinders, and cones. I can assemble and subtract forms from one another. But, it appears that more complex or irregular polygons are more difficult.
What CAD program do you use and why?
Alibre Design Expert. It’s a nice program and the educational version is only $200. It’s a bit overkill for my purposes (and it’d help if I knew how to use it better), but I’ve used it to make sheet metal designs, which is cool.
Here’s a quick tutorial I wrote for making curvy stuff:
http://ikmaak.nl/eenblog/2011/01/08/creating-curvy-3d-designs-with-openscad-and-qcad/