OpenSCAD - The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller
I&#x27;ve been using OpenSCAD for personal projects for a couple of months, generally preparing models for 3D FDM printing. I&#x27;m a mechanical engineer by profession and a certified Solidworks professional. I&#x27;d estimate that designing in OpenSCAD - as in, modelling something up and iterating on the design as my understanding of the application develops and prototypes are trialled - takes me four to fives times as long as using commercial parametric 3D CAD that I&#x27;m already familiar with.<p>That&#x27;s not a damning critique, but it is something I&#x27;d advise a friend or colleague who had a project to get on with. I&#x27;m still highly positive about OpenSCAD, because of its openness, its versatility, and the potential for using great programmers&#x27; tools (library code, scripting languages and version control) to make it much more powerful.<p>I&#x27;ve been working with vanilla OpenSCAD, downloading a few functions from people, and building little libraries of helper functions. Getting more familiar all along, figuring out the right way to do things. Some people have got a little further with creating scaffolding for mechanical design - projects like MCAD and OMDL. Of course, OpenSCAD is very versatile and people have many other uses for it. But I think when someone comes along and creates some really great libraries and frameworks on top of OpenSCAD - like LaTeX on top of TeX or Jupyter on top of iPython on top of Python - it would be suitable for any kind of design, competitive with the best GUI-based packages.