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Is there any 3D CAD software out there, free-ware, shareware, open-source, or commercial, that uses the simplified instruction set made famous by the Logo Turtle (e.g. FORWARD 100, LEFT 90, etc) as the basis for a scripted 3D CAD application? The scripting approach is simple and easy because the user is always at the location of the "turtle"; the command language is easier for some people to master than the GUI interfaces of many CAD programs.

This would be geared to DIY projects, not sophisticated engineering scenarios. For example, I'd really like to make a 3D rendering of a piping schematic, and it would be really cool to use the Logo-turtle instruction-set to plot out the length and direction of the pipes. FORWARD 100, LEFT 45, FORWARD 25, UP 29, FORWARD 40, etc . Even cooler would be the ability to drop into the emerging design appropriate fittings (elbows, T, Y, couplings,adapters, etc) selected from a Toolbox, and to do things like change pipe diameter on-the-fly.

Anything like this out there?

Steven Doggart
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Tim
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3 Answers3

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It's hard to answer a question like this in the negative with absolute assurance, but I believe the answer is no. The reason is that rather than specifying angles to turn right and left, (i.e. one rotational degree of freedom) you'd have to have roll, pitch and yaw (three rotational degrees of freedom). This would make control of a 3d turtle a bit tricky.

Further, a user would probably like to do more than just create lines and (segmented) curves. For instance, it's hard to see how the turtle paradigm would extend to surface modeling.

There are however, free products for intuitive 3d modeling. For instance Autodesk 123D or Google Sketchup.

Codie CodeMonkey
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  • Thanks for the reply. I agree, to do 3D the turtle would have to be a ninja turtle. I wish it were a lot easier with these packages to do simple pipe extrusions and direction changes. – Tim Jun 07 '11 at 11:17
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FMSLogo has commands for 3D drawing, for example: http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/manual/understand-your-orientation-in-3D.html. It seems that other Logo implementations have something similar as well. But perhaps it's still far away from what @Tim was looking for.

Alexey Kukanov
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While not Logo-based, one could script something along these lines using OpenSCAD pretty simply.

https://openscad.org/

The problem is that the 3D model gets very complex very quickly and performance bogs down.

Other similar tools include Toolpath Language: https://tplang.org/ which is integrated into the 3D previewer CAMotics: https://camotics.org/

Or, one could just use G-Code and G-Code previewer.

user22356
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