Hey there! As a 3D printer addict I do a lot of small parts in CAD to print and use around the house. Lately I’ve been exploring all sorts of CAD software since finding out there’s a more around than just Fusion360 and Onshape so I started exploring what’s out there and jotting down my impressions.
Hope this is not spam, just want to help people see what’s around and help them pick!
This is a field where free software is unfortunately way worse than the paid options, and all the paid options are expensive.
If you are still a student, you can get SolidWorks for 100 USD a year, or Creo, Inventor, or Solid Edge for free. Completely non-commercial though.
If you are serious about this, get a SolidWorks permanent standard license (it’s like 4 thousand USD?) or ZW3D permanent license which is just a bit cheaper, it’s a relatively new Chinese company though, so a bit of jankiness is expected, but up to you if you want to try them out.
Way worse? Maybe more difficult to learn.
FreeCAD is a great free open source 3D modeling software with plenty of online resources to help you get started.
FreeCAD has a lot of problems that stem from things like opaque errors (wire is not closed, failed to recompute) to how some features aren’t just there (multi surface sketch is the big one for me) that continuously break my flow. I could adapt but it feels a bit miserable to use compared to others. It’s not “hard” it is actually “worse” (for now)
Ive tried to use FreeCAD before, I’ve tried to learn how it works, and its just so different from other programs that I have used that I have to completely re-program myself to use it. I really want to like it, but its just such a pain in the ass to use.
I’d say the opposite is true. The pro CAD softwares are a lot more user friendly than FreeCAD in term of UX, so easier to learn too.
That’s literally what they said though? FreeCAD is more difficult to learn (but you have a lot of online resources to help).
Solid Edge is available for free for non-commercial use to everyone, I’m almost done writing its article and it looks really good tbh!
Never heard of ZW3D, sadly the pricing seem a bit steep for what I’m looking for :S
Do write a bit on synchronous modeling.
It’s up! Let me know if you have anything I should look at correcting
Looks good to me.
You can use Lemmy as your comment section. Would like to see you try out more CAD software, since this place really needs original content to grow.
Oh that’s a neat idea, I was exploring comment systems but the ones that inspired me (like Cactus Comments which is based on Matrix) I had trouble getting to work. I’ll try setting it up when I get more time!