ALPHA SOFTWARE, NOT READY FOR USE
This is currently made available for developers, don't expect this to be usable for a while. Core language primitives work for the most part, but things are missing and the stuff that does work doesn't work exactly like it does in openscad.
An openscad interpretor (compiler?) written in python and using signed-distance functions.
Compiles openscad code to a python abstract-syntax-tree (which can then be converted into python text or run on as-is)
We use fogleman's SDF library which makes exentsive use of numpy.
This is early alpha software, so there aren't any nice installers and it may not even work outside of linux (or at all). With that in mind...
Ensure that pipx is installed and working, then run
pipx install "pysdfscad[qtgui] @ git+https://github.com/traverseda/PySdfScad.git"
You can also try downloading a pre-built binary from here. These aren't currently tested.
working on making compiled versions available, you can compile this yourself using the
command in ./compile.sh.
At the moment this build is not great, and it's definitly prefered to install this project as a python package if you are able to.
While we aim to be fully compatible with openscad there are some difference. If you don't see that difference mentioned here, well that's probably a bug that needs fixing.
Right now we are NOT FEATURE COMPLETE WITH OPENSCAD. A number of openscad feature remain unimplemented.
- OpenScad meshes will be simpler and have smaller filesizes
PySdfScad constructes meshes by sampling a signed distance field, this essentially means that the entire object has the same amount of triangles for a given surface area, whether that surface is a large flat plain or a complicated curve.
This is something that can be improved upon in the future (look into collinear mesh simplification), but it's likely PySdfScad meshes will always be a bit "messier".
- There are a lot more options for modifying a mesh
This is really the reason this project exists, our underlying library
supports a number of more complicated ways of modifying geometry. and we expose
that as new openscad operators. For example you can use the shell(thickness=0.2){...}
operator to make objects hollow (amazing for things like pipes), or use
smooth_union to join two objects with a smooth fillet.
- You can't color a mesh, or make parts of it transparent
This is another thing that can probably be fixed eventually, but is still quite challenging.
- Wouldn't an interpreter be better than a compiler?
Probably, yeah. The openscad to AST got a bit out of hand. Now that it does exist though there are some pretty significant advantages. We can do proper tracebacks and other cool exception handling. We can also, furthur down the line, do things like import/introspect/modify an openscad file from another language (like python, or a theoretical future openscad-ish language).
More complicated than it probably needed to be, but I'm hopeful I can do some cool stuff with it in the future. The original (unfinished) interpreter code was also a handful, and I don't think this is all that much more unreadable. The output is generally more easily debugged, as we have a nicer intermediate state (python code) than we did when using an interpreter.
I don't want to give a false impression that it works from this carefully staged screenshot, it mostly doesn't.
