> The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes it easy to 3D model things which may be described using spheres, cylinders, and cubes which are stretch, and/or rotated, and arranged in 3D space.
It also has hulls and minkowski sums, which are powerful once you understand them.
Aren't hulls just a direct connection of the edges of two shapes (which could be simulated by a series of duplications) while Minkowski is "just" a matter of putting spheres along the edges of an object to round the straight edges?
So, spheres and cylinders and cubes placed, rotated, stretched and placed mathematically.
A hull requires at minimum one shape and returns a convex shape.
A minkowski sum, as far as I understand it, requires a surface and a volume and returns a volume.
Example 1: apply hull() to a star shape
Example 2: You want to fold a picture (SVG) around a cylinder and make its edges FDM printable by 45 degree overhang, apply a cone to the image