I can express myself well spatially in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD where you have to figure out what combination of buttons and parameters will do what I want.
I can manage dependencies well in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD. I continually struggle to design parts with geometry that is dependent on the spatial relationships and constraints of how multiple parts connect together.
FWIW, I crashed and burned with pretty much every 3D CAD tool I tried (though I did make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D which was a first), but OpenSCAD has been quite workable, and the development of a Python-enabled version:
Do you by any chance have over a decade of coding and under a year of CAD? You might have forgotten how hard coding was when you had under 200 hours of experience with it.
Comments
3D printing has been humbling for me.
I can express myself well spatially in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD where you have to figure out what combination of buttons and parameters will do what I want.
I can manage dependencies well in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD. I continually struggle to design parts with geometry that is dependent on the spatial relationships and constraints of how multiple parts connect together.
FWIW, I crashed and burned with pretty much every 3D CAD tool I tried (though I did make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D which was a first), but OpenSCAD has been quite workable, and the development of a Python-enabled version:
https://pythonscad.org/
has allowed me to extend it to do things which would be quite difficult in other tools:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
Have you ever tried https://openscad.org/?
OpenSCAD is very nice but if you combine it with BOSL2 you can do miracles:
https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2
Do you by any chance have over a decade of coding and under a year of CAD? You might have forgotten how hard coding was when you had under 200 hours of experience with it.
Cad in general isn’t good at modeling spacial relationships between parts as a graph.
Open SCAD is great, but also give cadquery a shot. It's my personal favorite right now