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?

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    543·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • oyo@lemm.eeEnglish
      157·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        7 days ago

        Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.

        I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.

      • ThurianCore@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        6 days ago

        Have you tried v1. 0 of freecad? It’s a completely different beast and I’m yet to find anything it can’t do versus fusion 360 (the previous package I used) . We’re actually using it professionally at my job now aswell because of its custom user made work benches and scripting tools which no other package allows.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          5 days ago

          I was recently using entirely legitimate professional software because I was sick of Fusion360’s cloud crap. Admittedly I wasn’t using it at a professional level, but previously I would’ve had the same trouble with FreeCAD, which was what drove me to my entirely legitimate alternatives.

          But just recently I was trying FreeCAD, and struggling a bit with the interface, when I checked the latest version which was 1.0.0.

          So I updated and it’s had a complete UI overhaul. It now looks and runs like pro software. It has a modern look, and the UI interactions are extremely smooth.

          My favourite part of it is the spreadsheet system. It’s fully-fledged spreadsheet software, and when you’ve made all the calculations, you just have to name the cells you need, and then you can access them as variables from the design. It’s really powerful for parametric design. That part of it was already much better than autodesk’s parameter system.

          Anyway, I’m not going back to Fusion or any of the pro software again. I’m doing my latest project in FreeCAD and it’s a super smooth experience.

    • Dimand@aussie.zoneEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      Blender has a decent cam processor add-on. Solve space and openSCAD are other very good parametric CAD programs.