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?
OpenSCAD. Nothing for the faint of heart, you need to know what you are doing, but it is perfect for programmers like me.
I absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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 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.
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
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.
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.
