Adding shapes

Drop parametric primitives onto the build plate.

Primitives are fully parametric — box, cylinder, sphere, cone, torus, pyramid, wedge, tube, text, and a rounded box and rounded cylinder. Every dimension stays editable, so you can change a size at any time without rebuilding the model. A Cone also has a Top radius: leave it at 0 for a point, or raise it for a flat-topped cone, wider than the base if you want it to flare out. A Torus has an Arc: below 360° it keeps only that much of the ring, with flat ends, which makes a bent pipe or an elbow. The Thread shape can also name a published size: pick a Standard such as M8 or 1/4-20 UNC and its diameter and pitch come from the ISO or Unified table instead of being typed, so a printed thread actually mates with real hardware. Beyond fasteners the list also covers garden-hose couplings and Edison lamp caps (E27, E14, E40 and the rest of the light-bulb sizes), which are a rounded thread rather than a 60° vee — pick one and the shape changes with it, so a printed lamp-base adapter screws into a real socket. It also shows the tap-drill diameter for the matching tapped hole. Leave Standard on Custom to enter your own diameter and pitch.

Text takes its words, face, size and height like any other shape, plus three settings that decide where the run sits. Anchor across and Anchor up/down choose which point of the text stays at the node’s origin — its middle, as every text always was, or an edge or the baseline as a typesetter would — so a longer word or a bigger size grows away from that point instead of re-centring. A .scad import keeps OpenSCAD’s own anchor this way, which is why a bound word re-lays out exactly as it does in OpenSCAD. Letter spacing multiplies the advance between letters; 1 is the face’s own spacing. Curve sets the line on an arc of that radius — positive arches it over the top, negative curves it under, for lettering round a ring or a coin; 0 is straight. Curved text is anchored where its first line meets the arc, at the middle of the baseline, so the circle it follows stays put as you change the words; the anchor settings apply to straight text only.

The palette is grouped by kind, and two of those groups exist to be cut away. Solids and Rounded hold the everyday shapes; Sketch holds the four you draw rather than dimension — Extrude, Revolve, Sweep and Loft; Mechanism holds the involute Spur gear, Ring gear and Rack alongside the Worm and the Thread.

Fasteners is the hardware you have to leave room for. Screw hole, Insert pocket, Nut trap and Slot arrive tinted translucent red because they are cutting tools — place one and subtract it — while Washer, Hex nut and Standoff are ordinary solids you print or fuse on. Each takes a Standard size, so an M3 hole is 3.4 mm to pass through, 3.2 for a close fit or 2.5 to tap, without you looking any of it up, and a Nut trap already sits 0.2 mm wider across the flats than the nut it holds. Bolting a part to something walks through a whole joint.

Panels holds a single shape and it is the same idea at scale: a Vent is a whole field of slots, round holes or honeycomb cells in one object, spaced by its pitch and the bar width left between them, ready to cut out of a wall — see vents and grilles.

Searching either panel finds both. A shape is a single building block you size in place; a generator in the Generate panel builds a ready-made design — an enclosure, a bolt and nut, a gear train — out of those blocks. Which panel a part lives in is not always obvious (a Spur gear is a shape, a Herringbone gear is a generator), so a search of two letters or more in either panel also lists the other panel’s matches by name under their own heading, and clicking one does exactly what it does in its own panel.

1. Open the Shapes panel and search or scroll to the primitive you want.
2. Click it to drop it at the origin, already selected.
3. Edit its dimensions in the Properties panel on the right.