I'm really enjoying OpenSCAD. First glance, it looks dated, but it actually works really well. Allows programmatic definition of 3D solids, using CSG. Because scenes can be described in code, it is easy to do instancing/modules (including layering of transforms), loops, conditions, and other parametric definition of things. Previews are fast and informative.
Lots of neat (and sometimes sophisticated features). I think it can do:
- (Optionally twisted) linear extrusions (
linear_extrude(height=..., twist=..., slices=...)) - Loading of paths from vector files.
- Minkowski sums (
minkowswki()). - Text solids, using any (?) of the system's available fonts.
- Examples: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Transformations
It seems to have different ways (or at least different resolution parameters) for resolving solids to actual STL geometry.
It doesn't seem to have native support for a clipping plane, but there might be a good enough way around this in code.
I'm trying to make yesterday's Measurebox using OpenSCAD code, now: measurebox.scad. It seems to work pretty well. It gets slow when "rendering" it (so that it can be exported to STL), but it looks like it has worked well. The slowest part is probably the text inside the ruler: I haven't figured out how to properly optimise that yet. It took 6.5 minutes to "render".