Sean McLoughlin's Blog

With the desire to make a Christmas ornament present for my wife, the inspiration provided by this post on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, and because I haven't touched my 3D printer in years, I decided to use Claude to generate a 3D model that I would be able to 3D print. How hard could it be?

TL;DR: As is the case for most things with current SOTA LLMs, it can do relatively basic stuff really well. It takes some iteration, but as someone who has had a very hard time doing even the most basic 3D modeling, using LLMs to make stuff for me has been a huge unlock in terms of what I'm capable of making. But when you start trying to make more complex designs, it starts to make illegible mistakes – similar to current SOTA LLMs in large codebases.

My goal was to make a jingle bell to place a Pandora charm in as a gift, and place the bell on a Christmas tree so that she'd have to search for the new ornament to get the gift. Something like this:

OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeller. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file. This gives you (the designer) full control over the modelling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modelling process or make designs that are defined by configurable parameters.

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