I visited a friend who is a professional medical engineer, and watched him work on a 3D design on some software paid for my the university they worked at. The options and features looked very practical!
Although I am not even close to working on so complicated projects, I did love the funtionalities. So now i have decided to put in the effort and learn a decent program, instead of using Tinkercad. I have been very happy with Tinkercad, but some things are only doable with workarounds or very creative methods.
The question is, what software should i start learning?
-FreeCAD
-Fusion 360
-AutoCAD
-Sketchup
-Blender
-LibreCAD
-Something else entirely?
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FreeCAD all the way.
The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.
Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that’s not what it’s for.
Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.
That leaves FreeCAD.
Solvespace is also an option. https://solvespace.com/index.pl
Cad Sketcher for blender exists https://www.cadsketcher.com/
It is based on the solvespace resolver iirc.
FreeCAD is open source, free, and recently released a big update that made it much better. Fusion is in a enshittification spiral.
@asbestos @cosmicrookie second the FreeCAD recommend. Started with it as a complete beginner and really enjoy it
Edit - I started just after the mentioned update
I’ll third it, I used Solidworks before, freecad was fairly easy to adapt to before the 1.0 release, workflow is even nicer now, trying to convince my dad to move to freecad over paying for a sw subscription now that he’s retired.
I believe that most, if not all of the ones that i listed, should be free, or at least have a very useful free version. Freecad I have heard a lot of though, and I see a lot of video tutorials on it, so it would be a good option!
Onshape should be at the top of that list. I use it both professionally and personally.
People get freaked out over the free tier data being public, but if you’ve ever tried searching for something that’s public you’d not worry.
Onshape? Its free for most normal 3d printing stuff, and if you get used to it, its pretty similar to the big boy AutoCAD if you need to use that later…
Freecad is free. It’s a huge pain compared to commercial though. It is a bit better with 1.0, but still. Gets slow when the scene / part gets complicated. Solidworks is pricy, but you can get a 1yr free pass for startups, with year 2 and 3 “discounted”. Best cad I tried so far, but fuck the pricing. Fusion pissess me off, can’t do things I want to do my own way. Sketchup was a toy last time I tried it. Blender is not CAD software.
As someone who has to interface professionally with solidworks and everyone at my company on the mechanical side uses solidworks, it is also slow as fuck when the part or assembly gets a bit complicated. Just opening it takes a few minutes. If we have to open solidworks and an assembly from scratch during a meeting, that is 10 minutes gone.
Definitely has 10x as many QoL and productvity features and much better TNP solutions and heuristics built over decades, plus very useful plugins, but speed and stability are not its strong points 😂
Yeah I recently started switching from SolidWorks to Creo in a professional setting, it is amazing how slow and clunky SolidWorks feels in comparison. The downside is that Creo doesn’t hold your hand at all so you better know what you are doing.
Coming from that side, I have a hard time with the free/inexpensive options available for makers, they just don’t work nearly as well.
Depends on what stability you are talking about. For freecad, I have to redo the entire part every time I change a dimension and the program doesn’t like it. Which is my main gripe with it - parametric cad that doesn’t like its parameters changed. It was worse before the naming problem was solved, but is still a huge issue. With solidworks and the same designs, we didn’t get as much lag (though it is a huge resource hog), but changing stuff earlier was a breeze and always worked
Just mashing together shape primitives and Thingiverse parts in TinkerCAD is entirely underrated. It’s still primarily what I use unless I need particularly curvy corner.
Fusion360 and FreeCAD are the CAD versions of Photoshop and GIMP (if Photoshop had a restricted free tier). They’re both trying to be a legit piece of CAD software, so there’s a bit of a learning curve coming from TinkerCAD. I found it easier to “feel my way around” Fusion360’s UI. FreeCAD has a layer of, “How did Open Source devs decide to be different here?” on top of learning something new.
I’ve used OpenSCAD, but I program, and it’s aimed at someone who wants to write code to generate their objects.
Fusion 360 is fantastic. It’s free for non-commercisl use. I’ve been using it for years and have zero complaints. It’s polished and powerful.
People complaining about it for ideological reasons have a point, but I disagree that it’s in some sort of “enshitification spiral”. It’s exactly as usable as it was 5 years ago. There are very few features locked behind a paywall, and they aren’t important to the average maker.
You can even use Fusion to run a CNC router. For free! With all the polish of commercial software.
Everyone I know at my local makerspace uses Fusion. I don’t know a single person who uses FreeCAD. A couple people use TinkerCAD. There’s a very large community of Fusion users and getting help is easy.
I am 100% in favor of FOSS. Give FreeCAD a try. I used it years ago because it had a plugin to make convolute gears with a couple of clicks. But don’t shy away from Fusion just because of all of the haters on here. Give it a try yourself. I think you’ll be impressed by what you get for free.
Fusion seems legit to me and it’s free for non commercial use. It seems more intuitive than other cad software though they all have a learning curve
Get on great with fusion 360. No cost, works well on expiry and import to slicer, really can’t complain. As It’s also an Autodesk product, there may be similarities but I jumped straight in and haven’t used Tinker.
I can heartily recommend FreeCAD after the 1.0 update. I’ve gotten quite used to it and have successfully designed complex systems such as a multichannel peristaltic pump for plant watering and planetary gearbox.
If you are looking for something with less of a learning curve jump from Tinker to free cad, I’d suggest Matter control as a nice free intermediate level workspace.
