1st semester
Studying architecture at
TU Berlin I was thankfully granted
permission to use the computer for my technical drawings at a point in
time when my class mates still had to use the pencil.
Naturally I resorted to OpenSCAD.
It gave me some little joys, but the more the project progressed the
more I was faced with OpenSCAD being slow. Here are some learnings:
- Making everything parametric, including the colors, is nice for the workflow.
-
Although
single source of truth
is a benefit to programming, try to only display the things one
needs at a point in time helps. This results in lots of
if (something)
in the code. - Mysteriously slow is creating 2d things with projection. I should try finding a faster way to get those. (The reason I used projection to begin with was getting images at a specific size, eg 1:200. Export as pdf can do that.)
- Next time: work with multiple files in order to scroll less.
- The walls in the image are black because they should be black in the floor plans. This was a mistake, I should have distinguished between 'walls seen from the outside' and 'walls that are cut' earlier in the process.
- That OpenSCAD is unsuitable for visualization isn't an actual problem. I thought I would render the building in Rhino afterwards but I didn't, I just drew some little trees into it with a graphic app.
- Weird in OpenSCAD: which color something has when using bool operations is pretty unpredictable to me.
The files are on Github.
Text last updated: April 29th, 2024