No, not like that.
My son was born 15 years ago.  :P

However, for his 15th birthday I thought maybe he'd enjoy a 3D printer.

And that has got me looking into OpenSCAD again.

Looking over OpenSCAD, it reminded me that it - shall we say - bears a
*striking* resemblance to POV-Ray.
So much so, that A look at its source might be illuminating.

Now the interesting thing is that OpenSCAD is under active development, is free,
open-source, and has a number of libraries.

They've done Google Summer of Code and all that stuff.

We could likely benefit from a lot of the work that's been done on their
software, and I can see that there could be a lot of cross-over.

So I'm inviting folks to go over, check things out, and maybe borrow a few
models and render them in POV-Ray.  Maybe join the forums and post renders, make
the off-hand comment about how code in OpenSCAD and POV-Ray are (clearly, with
certain differences) nearly identical.  "Hey, this thing this guy rendered would
be pretty neat to 3D print..."  "Hey, that 3D print came out ok, but I'll bet it
would an even more amazing render..."

Talent, expertise, enthusiasm, a vibrant community of coders that are already
familiar with something that's almost exactly like SDL...

I mean, I'm hoping that this doesn't even need selling.

- BE

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On 19/01/2026 01:11, Bald Eagle wrote:
> 
> No, not like that.
> My son was born 15 years ago.  :P
> 
> However, for his 15th birthday I thought maybe he'd enjoy a 3D printer.
> 
> And that has got me looking into OpenSCAD again.
> 

My congratulations to you and him !

Solid modelling always attracted me and I was working with
Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks, preferring the first as less buggy ).

What printer model do you have and what slicer are you using ?
I am happy with my CREALITY3D ENDER-3 Pro and Simplify3D for slicing.
-- 
YB

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yesbird wrote:

> What printer model do you have and what slicer are you using ?

Bambu Labs P1S with the AMS unit.
Just using the Bambu Studio slicer until I get accustomed to everything.

> I am happy with my CREALITY3D ENDER-3 Pro and Simplify3D for slicing.

Excellent.  It's always really just about what works.

I helped build a 3D printer from scratch, and reverse-engineered some Stratasys
stuff. There's always new materials, new techniques, and new tricks to push the
envelope with regard to what is possible.


Perhaps we should have a 3D printing sub-group....

- BE

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On 19/01/2026 04:53, Bald Eagle wrote:
> Bambu Labs P1S with the AMS unit.
> Just using the Bambu Studio slicer until I get accustomed to everything.

Excellent choice, I head that Bambu's printers are stable in work and 
produces high-quality models.

> Perhaps we should have a 3D printing sub-group....

I like this idea, although it's not POV-related. Looking forward
for shots of your printed models. :)
-- 
YB

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On 19/01/2026 05:42, yesbird wrote:
> 
> I like this idea, although it's not POV-related. Looking forward
> for shots of your printed models. :)

I am going to print surfaces from this resource:
http://3d-meier.de/tut3/Seite0.html

using my MathView:
https://mathview.yesbird.online

like here, for example:
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201208/rtx120801076p.pdf
--
YB

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yesbird wrote:
Excellent choice, I head that Bambu's printers are stable in work and
produces high-quality models.

I've seen it used on machinist channels like Inheritance Machining,
and they were having a "sale", so I just ran with that.
Wasn't prepared to shell out for a high end machine, since I didn't
really know how much actual use it would get.

But it did set up fairly fast and produced some decent quality prints using the
default settings on my wobbly coffee table.

> Perhaps we should have a 3D printing sub-group....

I like this idea, although it's not POV-related. Looking forward
for shots of your printed models. :)

Then you're missing the point of the opening post.
People who are members of exclusive country clubs aren't there to play golf.
They're there to meet up with other people in the echelon and privately discuss
and arrange things that can't be done in board meetings, in offices on company
time, etc.

The 3D printing group is to attract people from outside the raytracing community
 to the POV-Ray forums, so that they can be exposed to raytracing via a program
that uses a virtually identical language.
They may read other posts, and be able to offer helpful insights, suggestions,
or even code.

People can look through the 3D printing group and see something that they've
wanted to model and ask, "How did you do that?"

When we raytrace, an object in an empty POV-space will look flat, boring, and
substandard.
When we include objects in a scene such as HDR lighting or anything outside the
field of view that the central object can reflect or be influenced by via
radiosity, then there's a richness that can be achieved that is impossible to
get by rendering the central object alone.  That was a lesson I learned trying
to implement iridescence - the bubbles needed something in the scene to
reflect/refract.

We cannot raytrace in a vacuum.
We cannot hyper-focus on "POV-Ray".
I only started making significant advances with what I do when I started
investigating ShaderToy, CAD/Cam, Unity, video games, mathematics, physics, c++,
and other topics in the large penumbra from which everything in POV-Ray
originates.

I am going to print surfaces from this resource:
http://3d-meier.de/tut3/Seite0.html

like here, for example:
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201208/rtx120801076p.pdf

Yeah - I have been periodically returning to my work on the Dupin Cyclide, and
so I'll probably try to make a wireframe Dupin Cyclide and maybe one with a
Steiner Chain of spheres inside.

- BE

P.S.
Also, he're's a direct crossover that is directly related to both 3D printing
and POV-Ray.  :D

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4229898

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