What software are you using for CAD/modeling?
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?
No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.
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 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).
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 I kinda wish they had a half-decent reference for macro writing; they'll point you to their unfinished out of date wiki if you ask.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 I swear they rename/move a bunch of things every update so every guide is just a little bit out of date.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.
Idk Creo has pretty awful UX
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 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.
I absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it
I was learning with freecad.
Tried to defeature the screw holes on Steam Controller model and it crashed the application :/
I'm still learning so I have no idea how to do that manually :<
FreeCAD, and I recommend you give it a second try, while watching the excellent tutorials from Deltahedra and Mangojelly on YouTube. Lots of the jank can be avoided if you only know how, so the tutorials are extremely useful.
FreeCAD has gotten exponentially better with each release the last few years, and both active developers and funding/donations from users have increased exponentially. The future is bright. And unlike the "free" commercial programs, FreeCAD is immune to future rug-pulls and enshitification.
You might also want to try https://dune3d.org/ , a relatively new 3D CAD software
I'm using OpenSCAD because I want to program a fish!
+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:
In the "dark factory" paradigm:
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.
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.
FreeCAD. Anything that's not opensource is basically using you for some nefarious purpose. You're a product or a product in the making or you're making a product for them...you could be training a CAD AI to end all CAD.
FreeCAD is us. You use it, if you find a problem you report it or fix it. That simple. Your CAD files don't die because the company changed CEO or died.
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.
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.
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
OpenSCAD. Nothing for the faint of heart, you need to know what you are doing, but it is perfect for programmers like me.
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. FreeCAD is steadily getting better and better.
Blender for most things, freecad sometimes
FreeCAD, but basically because it was free and open source when I started learning (which wasn't long ago anyways)
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.
FreeCAD for most things. Microcad for anything I need to script. I hear OpenSCAD is promising.
OpenScad because I do simple things like funnels or part bins.
Yep. I wasted so much time learning Fusion and getting it to work under Linux. Writing code is so much easier.
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?
Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it's inherently cross-platform. BUT... their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can't make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.
Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.
SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you're on Windows, you'll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.
Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there's also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it's the full software and it's free as in beer.
Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It's a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.
I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that's what I generally use. It's somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn't cheap, probably two years' worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that's missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It's also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.
TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the "make shape, set solid or hole" workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you're on Fusion you're already past the need for it, i'd think.
There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that's (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.
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.
What sort of precision are you not getting from blender?
Once you set the parameters (I set mine to mm), I have found it to be accurate enough to make additional tools with which to measure.
Mind you, I don't need accuracy down past a mm.
I like using Blender too. Granted, I'm already somewhat familiar with it for art purposes. But just for STLs, if you know what you're doing you can actually get away with quite a bit using a boolean CAD-like workflow!
FreeCAD, but (from a pure usability perspective) OnShape is quite good if you just want something done (note my CAD usage is fairly limited).
OnShape. If you're familiar with Fusion360, OnShape requires almost no additional learning. Workflows are pretty much the exact same. It's free under the guise that everything you make is OnShapes IP. But if you're looking to model casually and aren't making things you wish to patent, it's great.
Not open source if that's a requirement.
This sounds insanely predatory and messed up. Is this not as absolutely nuts as it sounds? O.o
Just make a tool, and take someone else's work with that tool as your own? For real? This sounds really sus.
Ya agree with ya there
Yes, that's the deal. Pay for it or give up your stuff
I think the free version is more nuanced then that. By using the free version you agree to:
1.Use it for non commercial projects.
2 Place your designs in the public domain for anyone to use. Any design created from a free account is made public and may be used by others.
I didn't dig too deep so I'm not sure what restraints are placed on anyone using your design.
But at no point is Onshape claiming ownership of your design.
FreeCAD, runs on a damn potato. Fusion bakes it into charcoal instead. At least that is my experience on a kinda low-end laptop.
Oh, fusion is a heavy beast for sure. I just can’t stand FreeCAD’s interface.
I just wish someone would make an open source project with sketch based modeling and…. That’s all! I don’t need materials, rendering etc. I literally only need STL export.
But it needs to be as easy as shapr3d—which is marvelous, but $38usd/m for some stupid reason.
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
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).
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.
I use autodesk inventor, which is like the more professional version of fusion360. But there is no free version and it is very expensive, i have a free student licence.
I like it way more than fusion360, and it is much better at Assembly's. Still clumsy sometimes.
It doesn't run on linux so i just remote into an old windows laptop when i need it.
I have tried freecad and onshape a lillte but i am just so used to inventor that its harder to use them.
Plasticity. It's the best balance I've found between cost and usability. And it doesn't force you to save your files on someone's cloud.
You pay annually and get updates but when your year is up you can choose to pay less for each subsequent year or stop paying and continue using the version you currently have indefinitely without future updates.
I was a SketchUp make guy back in the day and was able to stick with it a long time but it's so old it isn't working right for me anymore (Linux).
Plasticity is about the closest thing I have found. I paid about 175 the other day and plan to use this version for the next 10 years.
I did the Plasticity demo, but I got busy and forgot about it. Now I can’t do another demo.
Same
What's the unique identifier, email? Just use a different email address
It doesn’t work. I’ve scoured my system and prefs and can’t find where it’s storing that I’ve done the demo. I’ve tried various emails. I’ll just run it in a VM I suppose!
Everyone is wrong. OpenSCAD is so much better than anything else. It's so much easier to just write code. I regret wasting so much time learning Fusion.
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
90% fusion
9% tinkercad
1% dicking around in OnShape, getting frustrated, and giving up
I bounced pretty hard off Free ad and ended up using OnShape. I don't feel great about it though.
Fusion360 for non-organic and Blender (with add-ons) for organic. I don't like fusion360 for organic stuff. FreeCAD was supposed to get a big update at some point but I never tried it. Autodesk Inventor was alright but I didn't like it as much as Fusion360.
FreeCAD, as of today, looks and feels like it was made in 2010 or earlier. I’m sure there is a type of person who FreeCAD check all their boxes and excites them to no end, but I am, sadly, not in that group.
Default look n feel does feel a couple of decades outdated. But it can easily be customized to look look much more modern and comfortable.
Youtube tutorials on how to get started often begins with customizing the user interface before even starting the modeling tutorial. I recommend Deltahedra and Mangojelly on YouTube
What are the main reasons you dislike fusion? I use MatterCAD - it's full of headaches and bugs but I find it super intuitive and a very low learning curve.
I've beens thinking of trying fusion despite disliking Adobe.
Adobe doesn’t own fusion. Did you mean Autodesk?
The cloud. I hate it. It also has way more than I actually need. It’s bulky. It’s importing assets is very limited in ways that I need.
I’ll take a look at MatterCAD. Thank you for the suggestion.
Yes, but I dislike both Adobe and auto desk. The learning curve felt steep to me last time I looked at fusion.
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?
My current use case right now is designing tiles and a set for a ttrpg campaign, so currently more the latter. As far as I’m aware though you can do some of the former it’s just that it’s not exactly the workflow you’d be used to. Precision isn’t the issue so much as having history I suppose. Just means you have to plan out your design a lot more ahead of time. I’ve tried some of the code based stuff like build123d since I’m a programmer and the like but frankly they never made much sense to me, although perhaps that’s the way it uses Python more than anything else. Admittedly I didn’t spent a whole lot of time on it though and I was pretty burned out at the time.
SolidWorks and Creo primarily, if I don't want to boot into Windows I've been using OnShape recently.
butterflies
I also don't have a good solution and I'm extremely slowly writing my own stuff starting from svg and drawings and some programming to do geometry. But I mostly haven't touched 3d yet.
I would use blender which you have already excluded so no idea.
Well, CAD and “3D” are not the same thing. Blender is good for 3d, but cad features are stapled on. Also blender has too many knobs—that is not useful for CAD
I use 3dstudio lol, because I know how it works quite well for my needs.
For 3d printing.
Wow that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while!
😁
I use Microsoft 3D Builder for most of my modeling stuff. Mainly for things like hardware type stuff. Or simple modifications to existing models if I need.
It has a simple interface, really easy to use. Builds models from simple shapes, no needing to learn a programming language or weird clunky interfaces.
Honestly most of the time I get by fine with Tinkercad if I'm making something functional, Blender if it's decorative.
I can't wrap my head around 2D interfaces for doing 3D modelling.
I know my measurements, so OpenSCAD feels more natural. I have done a fair amount of 3D programming in the last three decades, though.
I have a licensed seat of Solidworks on my work computer; that's where I learned to solid model. I also have an older pirated copy on my home computer but it requires Windows.
If I had to choose something free I would probably choose Onshape because it is very similar to Solidworks (it was created with help from one of the founders of Solidworks). However it sucks that all of your models are public.
Otherwise, the only viable option in my eyes would be Fusion 360.
I haven't tried it, but I know there is a plugin for Blender that allows you to do parametric modelling but I'm sure the options are pretty limited.
I am a big fan of OnShape, its free for personal use. By that they mean that all your projects are publicly accessible when using the free options. Otherwise its the same as the paid option. As a hobbiest this is fine with me because I am putting all my stuff up with a creative commons license anyway. It is my way of giving back to a community that has given me so many designs for free.
Teaching tech did a great introductory series on it which includes a video about why he chose on shape.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGqRUdq5ULsONnjEEPeBxxStEsobDKAtV
If you have experience with other cad programs you'll probably get through the videos quickly as the concepts translate from software to software, its just a difference in interface and execution.
I really wish onshape had a middle area between free and 1500 USD/y
Same with Shapr3D (which doesn’t export high res in free mode) I just can’t justify paying for subscriptions when I use it sporadically.
I don’t sell, and I don’t create frequently
Uhhhggggg I hate modern software!!!
OK, use the free tier if you don't sell... And if you don't like the terms, FreeCAD is your option.
Public files aren’t okay. Using public files as a way to get people to pay is also not okay.
What I’m getting from this community is to stick with Fusion. Which is fine I guess.
Curious what the hangup with that is?
SolidWorks