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.
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!
I tried Onshape and now switched to ondsel which is freecad but with a different user interface.
I’ve had success with it. I find onshape to be a little easier to work with, but I find owning my files more important.
Seems like they have closed down in 2024?
My understanding is many of their changes were merged back into Freecad for the 1.0 release.
Didn’t follow that, thx for the info! I’ll look to use freecad instead.
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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.
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.
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.
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
I found fusion360 and blender to be best for me. Fusion made by same company as tinkercad.
I tried freeCAD and had constant errors (like 20 at a time) and couldn’t figure out what was going on even tried googling. And that’s when I learned that’s just how it goes with that program.
I like blender to make sculpted models. Tutorials and figuring things out myself was frustrating but now I have a decent grasp on the basics and I find it much easier to use and keep learning new things all the time with it.
I’ve only used fusion for a few projects that required it and had to rely a lot on tutorial videos but I was able to do the modeling. I plan to learn more of it in the future but it’s pretty decent so far.
I’ve not used any of the others you have listed.
Another option is Alibre. It’s a one time purchase and fairly reasonably priced but windows only.
I purchased it about 18 months ago after getting tired of being frustrated by solid works makers hate for its customer.
The makers web ui is impossible to navigate, and Why do I have to log back in and decline cookies after every fucking 6gb solid works update?
With Alibre it never expires, I can use it commercially, and it has 99% of the functionality I need including sheet metal.
I’ve tried Shapr3D and it seems pretty good. Not open-source though. I’ve heard blender is a really good option if you want that, but I’ve never tried it as I don’t really do much 3D modelling
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…
