Tutorial Attachment Overview

Attachments Overview

BOSL2 introduces the concept of "attachables." You can do the following things with attachable shapes:

• Control where the shape appears and how it is oriented by anchoring and specifying orientation and spin
• Position or attach shapes relative to parent objects
• Tag objects and then control boolean operations based on their tags.
• Change the color of objects so that child objects are different colors than their parents

The various attachment features may seem complex at first, but attachability is one of the most important features of the BOSL2 library. It enables you to position objects relative to other objects in your model instead of having to keep track of absolute positions. It makes models simpler, more intuitive, and easier to maintain.

Almost all objects defined by BOSL2 are attachable. In addition, BOSL2 overrides the built-in definitions for cube(), cylinder(), sphere(), square(), circle() and text() and makes them attachable as well. However, some basic OpenSCAD built-in definitions are not attachable and will not work with the features described in this tutorial. The non-attachables are polyhedron(), linear_extrude(), rotate_extrude(), surface(), projection() and polygon(). Some of these have attachable alternatives: vnf_polyhedron(), linear_sweep(), rotate_sweep(), and region().