OSX app to create videos of STLs and OpenSCAD models

3D Printing
1

So I wanted an easy way to make a video of an OpenSCAD model rotating and tumbling in space and couldn’t find a truly easy way to do it. I decided to see if I could vibe-code one using Claude and lo and behold I not only could, but it actually seems…pretty good? Not only can it export videos, but also animated GIFs. You can select from a bunch of popular aspect ratios and resolutions, pick frame rate, etc. You can also select between some gradients, solid color, or transparent background.

Choose whether you turntable (and direction) or tumble (or both, in either order). The Automatic mode always finishes where it starts, so if you loop the video (or use animated GIF) it looks infinite. The Manual mode you just hit Record and do move it around with the mouse and either hit Stop when done -or- hit the “Return to Home” button (or Spacebar as the hotkey!) and it will move back to start and automatically stop the video so YOUR video will loop infinitely, too.

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Standard Sample - Long Tail

Anyway, if you want to try it out, you can get what you need here:

Let me know what you think. It’s all open source (MIT), but it was 100% written by Claude. I think I’ve tested it pretty well, but let me know if you find something broken! I’ve been adding these to my Makerworld projects to show off the solid a little better in the photo gallery and it seems to do a nice job of it.

2

The combination of automatic return-to-home and transparent backgrounds sounds especially useful for looping Makerworld project clips. One small robustness check worth adding is keeping the exported frame rate and resolution visible in the output metadata, since those settings are easy to lose when a GIF or video is handed off to another tool.

3

You mean just in the metadata? Because an animated gif can already have its resolution inspected easily, but no, frame rate isn’t there. There’s no specific field for it in a GIF, but there is a free text field where it could be placed. We could also made it possible to just automatically make it part of the filename, too. As far as video, that info is definitely already in the video metadata.

4

Yes, I meant the exported file metadata. Since GIFs do not have a standard frame-rate field, adding it to the filename would be a simple fallback.

5

Yes, I meant the exported file metadata rather than the GIF’s visible properties. Since video already carries that information, the filename or free-text field seems like the useful fallback for GIFs.