[OpenSCAD] What about STEP or IGES export?

[Marius Kintel]

On Feb 7, 2010, at 17:30 , Bryan Bishop wrote:
>
> Maybe. If you guys get some python bindings to the OpenSCAD parser,
> then I'll work on a pythonOCC script to call the OCC StepAPI routines.
>
What I interpret from this is that parametric modeling in STEP is  
either an immature or seldomly used feature or it would require a  
language or extension layered on top of it. Simple parametrization,  
like referencing earlier defined objects or variables, appears to be  
available. IGES is still unknown territory.

Exposing the OpenSCAD kernel (really the data structure of the CSG  
tree resulting from compiling the model) to  external programs or  
plugins would be a cool feature to have. This would force us to  
standardize the representation of said format, which is a good thing,  
albeit slightly early with such an immature piece of software as  
OpenSCAD, especially if we want to aim towards maintaining forward  
compatibility of such extensions.

However, what would help immensly in terms of evaluating the viability  
of representing parametric solid objects in STEP or IGES, would be to  
manually remodel a representative selection of the OpenSCAD examples  
in one or both of these formats to get an understanding of the  
inherent limitations of/differences between the OpenSCAD vs. STEP vs.  
IGES file formats/descriptions.

This was a bit fuzzy, but as I see it, OpenSCAD does something right  
but could do more right if we can find suitable wheels for those that  
have been attempted reinvented so far.

~/= Marius

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