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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There are two more alternatives, sadly for Windows only.
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Solidedge Free for non-commercial makers, relatively easy to learn. But fucking expensive when you want to go commercial.
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Solidworks Relatively cheap for makers and students,really expensive for commercial. The maker version has a reduced feature set,but that’s not that relevant for most purposes (more towards simulation and things like that) Personally I would prefer it over Solidedge, but that’s more of a personal view.
BUT: Both are Windows only(more or less), and of course commercial.
Sadly FreeCAD is not even close to most professional products - while it can be used for a lot of things,these things will take longer, be often more unstable and less “straightforward”.Nevertheless for most non-professional uses,it will suffice.
Thanks for the tips!
Can you explain examples of what FreeCAD is lacking at, compared to the pro software? I am not sure what I am going into, but would hate to limit myself or waste time/money just by making the wrong choice at this pointThere are two sides of issues with FreeCAD: On one side it has usability issues. The comes largely from the “workbench” concept, so often you will be missing a tool unless you change workbenches which in terms leads to another tool missing. Furthermore the UI is not really consistent in how things are named, how things are done,etc. Same goes for the actual step of editing things. So while you eventually “get there”, especially as a newcomer, it will take time and a bit of try and error. Parametric solutions are also very clunky and often not as feature rich. (Which is a pain if using it for woodworking) Another thing that is the whole “derivate” thing most professional CAD solutions offer - e.g. build plans, CAM, BOM, simulation,etc. You can do them with FreeCAD, but it takes some plugins and is nearly as good or comfortable as the professional solutions.
The other side is performance and stability. FreeCAD is a nightmare when it comes to importing thing with a lot facets or large files, is unstable as fuck when working with large assemblies and generally is slower compared to other solutions. (Even the otherwise not very fast Solidworks is faster)
In the end I would recommend you to try all three of them (and a few others from the list) and then decide if you can be bothered to use FreeCAD or find another solution worth it more. (Personally I would avoid Fusion,btw. due to the fact that it gets more enshitified daily)
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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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately FreeCAD is to professional 3D CAD as wet toilet paper is to kevlar. As someone who’s spent thousands of hours in solidworks, FreeCAD is physically painful to use. Onshape is the “free” compromise that generally works well.
