I’m using Fusion360, and I dislike it for a lot of reasons, but it’s easy to use. I tried FreeCAD, but it was very janky in comparison. Shapr3D was surprisingly good, but there’s no way I’m paying monthly for my hobby usage. I need precision prints, so I can’t just use Blender or similar.
Is there some magical unicorn software I’m not finding?
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Used to use fusion 360, hate cloud, freecad is painful to use, been trying out plasticity and it seems pretty decent
With plasticity, do you make precision parts where .1mm matters or is it more decorative designs?
No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.
FreeCAD has possibly the worst UI I have ever used combined with some of the worst UX of any software. But it has every feature I need, it’s free and it works (mostly).
Idk Creo has pretty awful UX
I haven’t used it in awhile, but OnShape I think had the best UI, for being in a browser.
There are some macros out there I’ve found that make FreeCAD a lot better. I kinda wish they had a half-decent reference for macro writing; they’ll point you to their unfinished out of date wiki if you ask.
Omg. I swear they rename/move a bunch of things every update so every guide is just a little bit oit of date.
The answer they give you is “If you want it written, YOU write it.” Which…it’s no wonder open source software doesn’t hold up, right? It’s made by idiots who think it’s up to end users to write the manual.
100% this. Ive been through 4 different cad packages professionally and every single one of them is terrible bad awful garbage. Pick your flavor of garbage and get with it.
After a few months of forcing myself to learn it, FreeCAD really isn’t that bad. It’s miles better than Creo.
FreeCAD, but (from a pure usability perspective) OnShape is quite good if you just want something done (note my CAD usage is fairly limited).
FreeCAD. It’s janky, absolutely, but it’s quite powerful once you get used to it. Improved a lot with the latest major update as well.
I also tried OpenSCAD for a bit. As someone with a programming background, I really like the principle of how it works. But ultimately, I found it way too limiting.
I used OpenSCAD for a bit, and it’s good for simple things where clicking is far less efficient. I once needed a plate with a set of holes. OpenSCAD was great.
Look up how to use FreeCAD’s spreadsheet.
I’m still learning FreeCAD, but so far is seems just fine to me! Just different from what I am used to. But there are a few good channels on YouTube that do good tutorials
What are you used to?
Do make sure to retry freecad if you havent in a while - they finally merged their big update that made faces not break - its still got a learning curve but its far less frustrating now
Fusion 360 as well. I think it’s great for rapid development, I’d love some of the paid options but not enough. Haven’t found anything else that comes close to its power whilst still costing nothing.
Blender for most things, freecad sometimes
I use FreeCAD, Fusion, and Solidworks. I don’t love freecad as it’s unintuitive and clunky. Solidworks is powerful and okay but I often find myself fighting with it.
Fusion, so far has been the one I like most, but it doesn’t run on Linux which forces me to keep my MacBook around. The collaboration features in fusion are good and it handles step files way better than solidworks does.
I know Rhino is really good for the price, so maybe consider testing it out. I believe the licensing is perpetual.
OnShape is what I use. Fusion is fine, but a little heavy for me.
FreeCAD is just slightly too clunky for what I use it for, but I’ll keep trying every release to see if I change my mind.
In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.
In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.
The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.
Onshape is the way to go for free tier CAD.
Otherwise TinkerCAD can work, it’s just more of an MS Paint version of CAD.
Onshape is nice and I enjoy using it, but the free tier has some really absurd caveats that anyone considering the platform should be aware of:
Free users are restricted from commercial use and all designs are publicly-available.
Additionally, while free users technically continue to own the IP they create, they lose control of licensing rights. Section 1.7.2.2 Your content - Intellectual Property of the Terms of Use states
For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User created on or after August 7, 2018, or any Public Document created prior to that date without a LICENSE tab, Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.
In theory, this means that while free users cannot monetize designs they made on the platform, paid users can take those files and monetize them without the consent of the creator(s).
I use FreeCAD.
I follow Mango Jelly Solutions and DeltaHedra on YouTube for tutorials.
I’ve had excellent results designing items for 3D prints.
Mango’s videos are great. I’d wager there are gems in there for even experienced users of freecad. I’m often surprised by some of the tricks he has.
There are gems. I sometimes need to do things I don’t often do in FreeCAD. A quick refresher from Mango, and I’m back in the groove.
Either SketchUp 2017 or FreeCAD depending upon complexity
Sketchup was used in the real world? I remember using it in the mid 2000s to make a castle to add across the street from my house in Earth.
It was first thing I used when starting on Anet A8.
I liked that it was simple had all kind of add-ons for 3D printing (solid inspector, BezierSpline, Fredo Corner, Tax Engineering, …)
so I just kept using it
I mainly use Blender and manually type in the sizes for things, make heavy use of the boolean operators to make holes and cutouts. I would like to learn FreeCAD eventually. I refuse to use proprietary products and services for my hobby projects.
I’m using OpenSCAD because I want to program a fish!
I love OpenSCAD because not only can I easily parameterize things, and define libraries for commonly used stuff but I can also combine it with my Git setup to get all the benefits of code provenance and backups and change sets and such.
+1 for OpenSCAD! If you have experience with scripting/coding, it feels really comfy. There’s a nice wikibook that taught me the basics.
The full release hasn’t been updated since 2021, so I highly recommend running a development snapshot. The preview and rendering are much more performant. Enable the “manifold” engine if it’s not on by default.
It works fine OOTB, but I customized it a bit to match my workflow: I use vim with an LSP as the text editor, and I use git to track my changes.
Now I’ve began using bosl2 in most of my projects. It has a lot of QOL features and can save a lot of work.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Over time, I’ve come to hate doing things in the “productivity-via-point-and-click-adventure” model. I very much think the use cases where the mouse is actually necessary are way slimmer than people really think.
If FreeCAD and similar tools take the approach of the “potter” paradigm where you connect your brain to the medium via your fingers as directly as possible even if the medium is digital/virtual (like most of the CAD programs out there), OpenSCAD is more of a “dark factory” paradigm where you externalize a piece of your mind/expertise into a program that encodes all of your expertise and the program acts on the medium on your behalf. (And in the case of OpenSCAD, the program is kindof “made of the same thing as the medium itself.”)
In the “potter” paradigm:
- You end up with a finished product, but devoid of any accounting of the decisions which went into making the finished product.
- Your metaphysical “finger prints” make it into the end product. The tiniest twitch of a finger is reflected in the final product, even if it’s an unconscious motion.
- Altering earlier steps that came earlier in the process isn’t as easy. Think of a painter layering paints to capture the subtle tones of human skin and then deciding that four layers down they wish they’d done something different. To fix it, they’d have to cover part of the image and redo all the steps manually. (And yes, undo chains attempt mitigate this somewhat, but imperfectly since reapplying later steps isn’t necessarily perfect.)
- Excessive precision isn’t typically possible.
- Making another, similar asset is a manual process that can’t reuse the steps/expertise that went into building previous ones cleanly.
- There’s no time spent after finishing your work where the computer has to work/chug to produce the finished product.
- Parameterized builds are less natural.
- For digital assets, almost always involves using a pointing device.
In the “dark factory” paradigm:
- You end up not just with a finished product, but also a program that gives much more insight into how the product was built and what decisions were made in the process of constructing it.
- Only conscious decisions go into the final product.
- Altering earlier steps can be done much more cleanly and later steps can be written in such a way that they “automatically” inherit properties introduced by changes in earlier steps.
- Perfection(ism?) by default. The perfect may be at risk of becoming the enemy of the good.
- Later, similar assets can reuse the logic from earlier assets where there are similarities.
- You might spend some time waiting for your program to finish running before your asset is ready.
- Parameterization is like breathing. It’s arguably easier than not parameterizing.
- Requires no mouse or pointing device. Just a text editor.
And mind you, a lot of programs try to kindof live somewhere in the middle. Being extremely mouse-driven while still supporting parameterization. Or doing sophisticated things with
I’m not trying to advocate against the “potter” paradigm. There are benefits and drawbacks to both. And I can’t bash just doing what works for you. But a) the “potter” paradigm doesn’t work for me very well at all and the “dark factory” paradigm does and b) I very much believe that the “dark factory” paradigm is so underserved as to be nearly non-existent. I know of OpenSCAD (and ImplicitCAD and a few others in the CAD space) and Graphviz and a few others that were suggested to me in this comment tree. And CodeComic which I personally wrote. And I’m working on another such DSL for making 3D models/assets for games and 3D animations. (Think “art” rather than “engineering”. FreeCAD is to OpenSCAD as Blender is to what I’m building. Yes I’m planning to Open Source it in the near-ish future.) But there’s so little in that realm.
So, as you can imagine I really love OpenSCAD. I’d be very surprised to find myself using anything else for CAD in the future that wasn’t a DSL.
P.S. Maybe I should start a blog. Heh.
