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CAD software sighs . One more work flow to learn - or rather to get annoyed you have to learn! Coming from 2D graphical design, several things about getting into CAD annoyed me. While some certainly had to do with unreasonable expectations (“Why can’t I extrude this complex vector graphic flawlessly?!”), others I think just has to do with the universal problem of how user interfaces creates norms of usage. Case in point: I get frustrated at GIMP for not being Photoshop, even though arguably Photoshop isn’t a better interface but rather just something I learned as a kid and stuck with. Fusion360 turned out to be the very best industry standard CAD from a UI perspective, but it still felt like someone else’s Photoshop that must seem normal to them but in many regards infuriating to me. I do have a grasp on thinking in geometries, however, so naturally I gravitated towards scripting things in OpenSCAD. But script languages, for all the simplicity and directness of use they have, still suffer from problems with the documentation and “dictionary” of functions - so it still annoyed me more than helped me in my rush of wanting to get something done NOW.

Enter Antimony. A small project from a couple of years ago with a node based, visual scripting approach to CAD. Quite wonderfully, it lacked all the dictionary problems I had with OpenSCAD - all the objects you’d want are included in a drop-down menu, so the threshold to start experimenting is very low. While it can’t do everything a fully featured CAD software can, it can do the basics while maintaining as small of a UI presence as possible. What a delight!

As a musician, my entry into programming came through MAX/MSP, a similar thing in so much that it’s a node based, visual programming language. However, compared to Antimony, it does have some dictionary problems even though it has a great documentation menus with lists of objects. As a sidenote - the best way to learn Puredata (open source alternative to MAX-MSP by its original creator Miller Puckett) is to use a trial of Max/MSP and then ditch it when you’ve learned enough through its tutorials and whatnot.

Antimony, then, is a very clean experience. While it’s not as feature rich as other softwares, it’s in my opinion arguably the best way to learn CAD that I’ve found. While directly jumping into the esoteric, submenu driven UIs of the big players will delay just learning the core concepts of CAD - how to think geometrically about combining, subtracting shapes etcetera - Antimony gives you all the core basics directly at your fingers right away with only one menu.

So if you want to dip your toes into CAD, I can wholeheartedly recommend giving Antimony a try - just beware that all node based scripting and programming starts getting out of hand when you go up in complexity … hence why text based alternatives are much easier to sort and organize: