I would prefer to see that confirmation shown on the account, that is after all, only fair.
Ok. I will inform other staff to check this problem.
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Just a thought - another great set of features would be additional viewing controls. So having the ability to zoom to fit, an orbit cube for quick directional views, and other standard CAD types of view controls.
A question for the group.
How do users review the OpenSCAD file (not associated profiles)?
I have just had a user add a manual comment to one of my OpenSCAD projects with 5 asterisks because there isn’t a mechanism.
If someone isn’t rating a profile, there is no rating.
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Good question. Actually you can’t give 5 stars if you don’t download a profile and users are forced to give a manual rating . I understand that the star rating is about the print profile only, everyone , basically, after creating their own file also creates the custom profile. At least you found an honest user who gave you a 5 star rating in the comments , were they all like this the world would be better 
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Yes! I was saying you fixed it earlier. Y’all fixed this already thank you 
I’ve been genuinely impressed at the number of users of the Parametric Model Maker, and I can only imagine that the MakerWorld team is working hard to make more improvements. Here is my latest suggestion:
Building on my previous post where I shared insights into enhancing the OpenSCAD editor. Today, I’d like to propose a feature that I believe would significantly boost the functionality and user-friendliness of our design interface.
Conditional Rendering within the Model Maker Editor: Introduce the capability for designers to conditionally render fields and sections based on user inputs. For instance, if we employ a dropdown field for selecting model variants, the editor could then display only the relevant fields or parameters that pertain to the selected variant. This would not only streamline the design process but also simplify the interface for users, making it more intuitive and less cluttered.
The suggestion you make is good, however, it has one problem.
OpenSCAD doesn’t have that capability.
The customisation panel exposed in the MW interface is built using the way OpenSCAD provides the same UI.
OpenSCAD is very good, but its underlying programming model is limited.
Whilst it provides variables, they are immutable. You cannot change its value after it has been declared. Yes, a non-variable variable - nuts!
Even if you could provide some form of adaptable UI, it would require some form of mutable variable (ones that can change).
The existing UI in OpenSCAD, MW and thingiverse are post-process reading of the source code comments looking for defined syntax to display the choices and then render an appropriate control.
I would love to be able to have a user choose from a drop down a main choice which then changes one or more sub-choices. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible.
The only way around it would be for MW to invent a solution and decouple the UI from the code. This would make the barrier to entry harder for new and old users alike.
As with all things, given a bit of time, developer-designers will figure out new ways to change the UX of their questions to improve the user experience.
All that said, the ability to for users to access choices to make their own version of something an amazing leap beyond predetermined models. (Obviously, for those that are appropriate.)
I have two up at the moment, I have several more in the works and dozens of old scripts I can convert to be user friendly.
Just one of my OpenSCAD offerings currently has more than 30 distinctly different parameters to make very different outcomes.
Another one automatically generates a stand for the original item in one of several styles the user can pick, no need to set any of its values as it has more than enough from the main model. This is one way improvements can come. Understanding the goal of the script from the users perspective.
I would dearly love these features added to close the gap on what OpenSCAD can do and what the MW implementation provides.
- Custom fonts I provide
- Access to supporting files I upload to the project
- Private source code option
- Ability for the user to save their settings for use later
I have some projects that I am uncomfortable giving away the code, but, happy to let people have the results.
This is equivalent to people only sharing the STL rather than the STEP or fusion 360 files.
As it stands, MW require us to give away the cow rather than the milk.
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Thank you for your detailed response and insights. I agree with your other gaps described and I understand your point regarding the limitations of OpenSCAD and the existing UI implementation.
However, to clarify, my suggestion is not about changing the OpenSCAD model itself post-rendering. Instead, it is purely a UI enhancement within the MakerWorld interface where users set their values before generating the model. The idea is to create a more dynamic and user-friendly experience by conditionally showing or hiding fields based on user inputs in the dropdowns. It would be super helpful on your QC code generator.
This proposed feature would be a custom implementation for MakerWorld, using specific commenting syntax to drive the dynamic variables. The intention is to make the interface more intuitive and less cluttered, ultimately simplifying the design process for users without omitting any variables from the code. Because this would be driven based on new comment syntax, it would not need to be a breaking change for existing OpenSCAD files.
I understood the requirement and the benefits, I was just pointing out the significant difficulties in achieving it.
Even if BL did this specifically for MW, it would be a very complex issue to solve.
If the designer-developer had to encode everything they wrote for MW to parse that would be very tough trying to realise that logic without asking it impossible to run in OpenSCAD itself.
This would require a new syntax for comments that includes logic branching.
If the logic was decoupled from the original source that would introduce even more complexities.
Nothing is impossible of course. It just depends on the amount of effort any of the parties want to spend on it.
I can’t imagine BL wants to spend more time on it yet as they haven’t yet determined if the effort to reward ratio will persist with the OpenSCAD integration.
I’ve being thinking about this a bit.
One thing I would like right now that wouldn’t be too much of an issue for MW to implement and would stop the source OpenSCAD files from running natively is having an optional image appear for drop down choices.
This clearly isn’t the programmatic end goal you are hoping for, but, would make some UX improvements.
One issue the current implementation MW has it the view is always the rendered output and never the preview. I understand why they have done this, but, it does limit how we design the UX to our models for the user to understand.
I tend to have a number of dropdowns in my models to allow the user the ability to change the design in a fundamental way.
My QR Code generator includes an automatic stand generator, it has several styles (more coming). The user has to guess what my description will look like.
If an associated image was shown under the drop down for each choice, I could supply preview thumbnails of that specific feature so they knew what was going to change before it does. They can quickly swap between them before settling on one and rendering the model again.
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This is a good suggestion. But we want our maker keep consistent with OpenSCAD client, so we can’t add this capability.
We consider to add a similar capability by adding a low-code platform based on OpenSCAD. Everyone can build a maker and adjust UI by this low-code platform. And of course, this new maker can share to the community.
Can you at least fix one difference between your implementation of the Parametric UI and the one created within OpenSCAD?
If I add a variable name “One_Two_Three” it is displayed as…
OpenSCAD (correct)
One Two Three
MakerWorld (incorrect)
One_Two_Three
The underscores are meant to be converted into spaces so they appear like questions and are easier to read.
Other things
-
I can provide you with a simple way to integrate my suggestion of optional dropdown image thumbnails without affecting the original OpenSCAD source code.
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Private OpenSCAD source code is an important missing feature meaning I can’t provide some scripts.
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Expand the existing public fonts. There are no fonts in the currently available pool with a chunky style (I do NOT mean font-weights). Chewy is an example of a font designed to be chunky.
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Custom fonts (provided with Raw Model Files) are also an urgent requirement, without this there are many OpenSCAD models I can’t provide as the models are dependent on specific fonts.
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Access to files provided within Raw Model Files from OpenSCAD. My more detailed models require the import command to pull in supporting files.
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User saveable settings. This is another feature available in OpenSCAD which is not currently available within MW. This is a simple JSON file that can easily be read back.
Please provide feedback on each of these, with a likelihood for each.
Thanks for the reply and that makes sense. I’m on the edge of my seating hearing about the possibility of a low-code platform. I would love to program and share interesting builds.
We will fix this in next publish
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Thanks for your adivce.
- I appreciate your suggestion, but this feature may be beyond the current scope of OpenSCAD.
- This is a good idea. Supporting multiple files is on our roadmap. We can add options for both private and public file access.
- We will add more font in future updates.
- Implementing custom font support is not a high priority at the moment. Since we use a server to generate the models, custom fonts need to be uploaded to the server, which requires further investigation. I can add this to our backlog for future consideration.
- Could you please provide more details on this request?
- This is a great suggestion. We will add a settings to allow users to control which feature is enabled. And of course, any pre-defined features set by the content uploader should be supported.
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More details on point 5.
Example:
Imagine I have a model that includes a complicated logo.
In OpenSCAD I would use the import command and import an SVG file that contains all the geometry. Without this feature, it would not be possible to recreate the logo within OpenSCAD.
import("path\file.svg");
I could include the SVG files in the Raw Model Files.
- file.svg
- logo.svg
- design.svg
The OpenSCAD script would then be able to access any of those files using the import command to be part of the final model in whatever way the designer (me) decided.
Other supported files include:
- STL (both ASCII and Binary)
- OFF
- AMF [Note: Requires version 2019.05]
- 3MF [Note: Requires version 2019.05]
2D formats
- DXF
- SVG [Note: Requires version 2019.05]
Another command capable of accessing external files is surface such as; PNG & dat files.
OpenSCAD also support the import of STL files
More details on point 3.
Can you publish a list of currently available fonts (digging through the UI was painful)?
Can WE suggest new fonts for inclusion? I assume you are using Google Fonts.
Can new additions be added to the published list and shown when they were added? This will make it easier to update our code to include them when the list expands.
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Another nice feature would be some way of specifying an empty default printer profile to use for the models that are created. Or ideally, some way of syncing settings between the printer profile and the customized model like line_width and layer height.
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I agree, I think there are also a lot of successful prints being generated from downloaded models using the parametric model maker that is not being counted towards successful prints, thus not earning all of the points. I don’t want to split hairs about the points, but it would be nice to know if people using the model are getting successful prints and get their feedback and ratings, which only happens if they have a successful print.
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