HelloOpenSCADOpenSCAD is a very popular 3D modeling tool in the 3D printing community. Many of the projects available to print on Thingiverse were generated from OpenSCAD. This is most obvious when authors uploaded their .scad files for sharing with the community, but also visible as a core pillar of the "customizable things" section. The customization capability is made possible by variables the author made adjustable in OpenSCAD.

I started designing for 3D printing with the GUI CAD tools, Onshape and Fusion360, so the text-based approach of OpenSCAD seemed strange and foreign at first glance. The official OpenSCAD web site documentation pointed to several tutorials. Not knowing the comparative advantage of one versus another, I just clicked on the first in the list How to use OpenSCAD. It linked to several other tutorials, the most notable one being Know only 10 things to be dangerous in OpenSCAD as having the most compact words-to-content ratio.

I had initially approached it as "Boy it's going to be hard to completely change my thinking" but as I got along in the tutorial I realized things didn't feel as foreign as I thought it might be. Digging through musty memories, I realized I had encountered this type of 3D modeling (CSG or Constructive Solid Geometry) before many years ago in the form of POV-Ray. Back in the days when a 20-megahertz 386 was a pretty speedy CPU, and the floating point processor wasn't a standard part of every PC. I had to upgrade my computer with the purchase of a 387 math co-processor in order to render my POV-Ray projects at a reasonable speed.

Editing CSG files for rendering in POV-Ray was my first exposure to 3D computer graphics, and I chose it because it was free. I couldn't afford GUI graphics software (the flagship at the time was Autodesk 3D Studio) so I started with the basics and I learned a lot that way. In time, I might appreciate the straightforward simplicity of OpenSCAD in the same way.