Call me old school, but I don’t like using interactive, mouse-driven, CAD software. I have tried using blender for miniature kit design, of course, but I never liked it. I have difficulties wrapping my mind around the controls philosophy (modes!) and remembering shortcuts to be efficient. Still, I have produced in blender a first conversion piece to build slasher gargants out of plastic Killa Kanz kits in blender and geometry nodes and realized when I tried to pick it up again that I had fogotten how to use the damn thing.

So I tried using OpenScad with the wonderful BOSL2 library to continue the project. I will try to reflect on this experience briefly in this post.

The main work consisted in creating an OpenScad module that would take a nice zero-thickness surface (a VNF i.e. vertices and faces) and produce a polyhedron that looks like an ork metal plate (unevenly riveted, unregular side).

It mostly worked (the proof is in the soon to be released pudding) but it was a pain. The code to produce an ork_plating() module was a bit difficult to produce but doable. But I faced problems with unpredictability in the results. It was probably due to the buggyness of my code, but the same model could compile or not just by changing the resolution of a nurb. Apart from this, compile times are loooooong (I have a M1 macbooc pro) and are not suitable for an incremental design process. It is also difficult to add small details and “flair” to the model solely in OpenScad.

The conclusion here is that I have to bite the bullet and go back to blender + geometry nodes (I want a non-destructive process).