An OpenSCAD Tutorial

cylinder();

First to make it a little easier on the eyes type in this command:

$fn=25

This will result in all the cylinders you draw to have 25 “faces”. Cylinders are rendered in OpenSCAD by drawing many faces rotated around a center. The larger the number in the variable $fn, the smoother the cylinder will appear.

The cylinder command in its basic form

cylinder();

This will draw a single cylinder with a comman radius of 1 and height of 1.

We can extend the basic command by adding a value

cylinder(10);

will draw a single cylinder with a common radius of 1 and height of 10.

To change the radius we must move to the second form

cylinder(10,5);

will draw a cone shaped cylinder with a height of 10 and a bottom radius of 5.

We can turn this cone into a cylinder by adding a second radius

cylinder (10,5,5);

Now we have a cylinder 10 units tall with a common radius.

There is a more expicit way of denoting the parameters we can assign values to Hieght and Radius explicitly.

cylinder ( h=7, r=7 );

cylinder ( r=7, h=7 );

both yield a cylinder 7 untis high and 7 units in radius.

If we want a second radius we can add it as such

cylinder ( h=7, r1=7,r2=10 );

We can also provide diameter instead of radius

cylinder ( h=7, d1=7,d2=10 );

Finally if we can move the origin of the cylinder to the very center ( Height and Radius ) we can use the center keyowrd.

cylinder ( h=7, r1=7,r2=10 , center = true);

Normally the origin of the cylinder is at the base of the unit.

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