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OpenSCAD is a software for creating 3D objects like a programming
language, with the possibility to preview your creation.
I am personaly interested in 3D things, I have been playing with 3ds
Max and Blender for creating 3d objects but I never felt really
comfortable with them. I discovered pov-ray a few years ago which is
used to create rendered pictures instead of creating objects. Pov-ray
use its own "programming language" to describe the scene and make the
render. Now, I have a 3D printer and I would like to create things to
print, but I don't like the GUI stuff of Blender and Pov-ray don't
create objects, so... OpenSCAD ! This is the pov-ray of objects !
Here is a simple example that create an empty box (difference of 2
cubes) and a screw propeller:
width = 3;
height = 3;
depth = 6;
thickness = 0.2;
difference() {
cube( [width,depth,height], true);
translate( [0,0,thickness] )
cube( [width-thickness, depth-thickness, height], true);
}
translate( [ width , 0 , 0 ])
linear_extrude(twist = 400, height = height*2)
square(2,true);
The following picture is made from the code above:
![openscad][]
There are scad-mode and scad-preview for emacs for editing OpenSCAD
files. scad-mode will check the coloration/syntax and scad-preview
will create the OpenScad render inside a Emacs pane. Personaly, I use
OpenSCAD opened in some corner of the screen with option set to
render on file change, and I edit with emacs. Of course you can use
any editor, or the embedded editor which is a Scintilla one which is
pretty usable.
[OpenSCAD website](http://www.openscad.org/index.html)
[OpenSCAD gallery](http://www.openscad.org/gallery.html)
[openscad]: static/openscad-rendu.png "Openscad render picture"