I occasionally do some work in OpenSCAD on Fiverr. Instead of sending 100 screenshots each day I would like to provide my clients with a live 3D preview of the object. But I need to do this without giving the source away (in the past I have been naive enough to get scammed this way).
I want my clients to be able look at the live 3D view without being able to see the source code.
For example, the following is a possible solution I was thinking of: hardcode the contents of the .scad file into a string inside an executable. Then start OpenSCAD with this string but only show the preview window, without the client being to look at the code.
You can, in fact, use the openscad.exe to generate a preview from a .scad file:
& "C:\Program Files\OpenSCAD\openscad.exe" --preview --camera=0,0,0,45,45,0,200 test.scad -o test.png
However, there are two problems with this method. 1. It only generates a PNG, I need my clients to be able to pan and zoom. 2. It needs a local file. I could generate a tmp file, open it with above command and then quickly delete the file.
Consider sending an STL file for them to look at. OpenSCAD can export to STL. There are two versions of STL: ascii and binary. OpenSCAD outputs the binary form. Your clients could view your STL file in something like viewstl.com.
Since they could 3d print from the STL you might consider adding some watermark type textures or features that would be difficult to remove. Another option would be to change some key dimensions enough to make it unusable but not so much that it looks bad.