Marble Fountain Generator

This is a repository of code to procedurally generate large complex organic marble runs.

This codebase is super bodged together and I give no garuntees of y'all being able to anything working. The whole thing desperately needs a massive cleanup and I am way outside the level of complexity that OpenSCAD is the best tool for. If I do take the time to refactor I'm likely going to do a substantial rewrite and use a different tool for mesh generation.

I am leaving the door open to selling sculptures generated by this system and thus this repo is intended more as an interesting reference than an open-source project. That said, if I saw this project online I would want to be able to see how it works, so I figured folks would prefer that I share it as is than not at all.

Commands

Run full generation in one line python3 newPath.py output/ SOLVE && python3 pathGen.py && python3 modelGen.py && python3 makeSTLs.py

python3 newPath.py output/ SOLVE re-initializes the paths

python3 pathGen.py runs the solver

python3 modelGen.py generates track and support geometry into scad files

python3 makeSTLs.py generates stls from scad files

While pathGen.py runs python3 shared.py will plot the paths as they are solved

defs.py defines a ton of static variables for configuring the generation, some of which have comments

animate_generation.py generates animations of the generation running by repeatedly opening OpenSCAD.appimage which is very slow

Caveats

This only runs on Linux (WSL should work)

The screw and base are sized to fit a nema 17 stepper motor glued onto the base

Everything is tuned around 1/4" ball bearings and you may need to retune things for anything else

makeSTLs.py assumes you have OpenSCAD at ~/install/OpenSCAD.AppImage

Some of the random knobs in defs.py have not been touched in over a year and I don't remember what they do

This code is extremely poorly optimized. I'm not even using KD trees for point collision. I have been much more focused on the output than how long it took to converge.

This is published under a non-commercial license. Do not sell the code, exported models, or any objects manufactured using this tool.

I have only tested printing this on the Form4 & Form4L.