I think "hard surface modeling" is a keyword you might want to look up. Also look into traditional CAD and "parametric design". All of these have considerable overlap and are focussed on mostly "boxy shapes" with some "free form surfaces" added.
On the other end of the spectrum you have "sculping" for organic shapes and you might want dig into the community around ZBrush, if you want to fill the gap from "start with a cube" to real sculpting.
More niche, but where I feel home, is the model with coordinates and text input approach. I don't know if it has a real name, but here istwhere is pops up and where I worked with it:
- In original AutoCAD (think 90s) a lot of the heavy lifting was done on an integrated command line hacking in many coordinates
- POVRay (and its predecessors and relatives) has a really nice DSL to do CSG with algebraic hypersurfaces. Sounds way more scary than it is. Mark Shuttleworth used it on his space trip to make a render for example.
- Professionally I worked for a couple of years with a tool called FEMAP. I used a lot of coordinate entry and formulas to define stuff and FEMAP is well suited for that.
- Finally OpenSCAD for a contemporary example of the approach.
On the other end of the spectrum you have "sculping" for organic shapes and you might want dig into the community around ZBrush, if you want to fill the gap from "start with a cube" to real sculpting.
More niche, but where I feel home, is the model with coordinates and text input approach. I don't know if it has a real name, but here istwhere is pops up and where I worked with it:
- In original AutoCAD (think 90s) a lot of the heavy lifting was done on an integrated command line hacking in many coordinates
- POVRay (and its predecessors and relatives) has a really nice DSL to do CSG with algebraic hypersurfaces. Sounds way more scary than it is. Mark Shuttleworth used it on his space trip to make a render for example.
- Professionally I worked for a couple of years with a tool called FEMAP. I used a lot of coordinate entry and formulas to define stuff and FEMAP is well suited for that.
- Finally OpenSCAD for a contemporary example of the approach.