OpenSCAD turns every model into triangles — its 3D exports are STL, 3MF, OFF and AMF. STEP describes surfaces exactly, and that is what machine shops, injection molders, CAM toolpaths and parametric CAD expect.
Mesh vs. exact surfaces
In a mesh, a 10 mm hole is a ring of flat strips. It prints fine, but CAD can't select it as a hole or tell you its diameter, and CAM can't recognise it as something to drill. In a STEP file from a CAD kernel, the same hole is one cylindrical face with an exact radius.
The usual workarounds
FreeCAD's OpenSCAD workbench
How
Import the .scad (or OpenSCAD's .csg export) into FreeCAD, which rebuilds the primitives as solids, then export STEP.
The catch
Needs FreeCAD and OpenSCAD installed locally. Operations it can't rebuild natively — hull() and minkowski() in many cases — come back as meshes, so the STEP is only partly solid.
Mesh-to-STEP converters
How
Export STL from OpenSCAD, then wrap it in a STEP file.
The catch
Each triangle becomes a planar face. The file opens anywhere, but it is still a mesh: no cylinders, no holes to select, and thousands of faces for CAM to choke on.
Remodel it by hand
How
Rebuild the part in a CAD program from your dimensions.
The catch
Exact, but hours of work per part — and it starts over every time the .scad changes.
What Forgent3D does instead
OpenSCAD itself evaluates your code, so the language behaves exactly as it does on your machine. Our CAD kernel then rebuilds every primitive and boolean as exact geometry — a circle becomes a true cylinder, not a polygon — and exports that as STEP.
