What 3D design software are people using?  

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @phd

I suppose everything mentioned here runs on Windows...

No, it also runs on Mac :). As a Linux user you should just check all software mentioned here for Linux compatibility. Sometimes there is no way around the virtual machine and sometimes it runs native. 

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Blender runs on Linux and heres a link to some others, I cant comment on how good most are since I am a Windows user, but maybe someone with some experience of using these can comment.

https://www.sculpteo.com/blog/2016/07/05/top-7-best-3d-modeling-softwares-for-3d-printing-linux/

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @jsw

 

Well, I certainly would never consider being 'limited' if running Linux!  🙂 🙂 🙂

I was not implying that Linux is limited, just that I choose not to run Windows on my desktop but this might imply some limitations as to which software is available.

Thanks for the details; I'll check these out.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

There are some wonderful Fusion 360 Tutorials on YouTube. Worth watching even if you don't use the program.

Fusion 360 is the only design tool I am trying to get good at. But you can't avoid OpenScad, so you might as well pick it up now.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

@robert-rmm200

Oh yes you can 🙂  (avoid OpenScad that is)

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @neophyl

@robert-rmm200

Oh yes you can 🙂  (avoid OpenScad that is)

A lot of things on Thingiverse, like https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1068443 (recommended),

include the .scad file. And if you want to see "how the devil did he do that", you pretty much have to open it in OpenScad.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I am doing technical parts and therefore I use onshape (onshape.com), which is cloud-based and very similar to Solid Works.

Without internet connection I am on FreeCad, but I am not too familiar with it.

Best regards, Clemens

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I upgraded my 3d printer recently and I decided to switch to fusion 360. I noticed that its a lot easier to use. Ive been enjoying my new 3d printer a lot. If youre planning  on upgrading your 3d printer, you should check out this website to help you decide.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I used just Fusion 360 for the longest time (123D design was my first CAD package when it was still around), for personal, commercial and university work, and I have used most of the features now, including generative design. It's a great piece of software and I find my workflow is very streamlined and quicker on it.

I have recently changed over to using FreeCAD however, for a few reasons:

1 it's free, including for commercial use. This is really useful if you are just starting commercial work, or want to make some commercial designs and don't have the cashflow for commercial CAD licences. I have tried starting selling some designs a few years ago, but the licence costs made it non viable. For freelance design work or company work the licence cost is easily managable and actually very reasonable, although they sneak in 'Cloud Credits' which you have to buy for certain thing like rendered animations which can stack up to be pretty substantial.

2 Open source. Open source is nice, and it runs on Linux which I am thinking of switching over to. Something else to consider is that although Fusion 360 is free for personal use, anything you make with that licence cannot be used commercially, ever. So when you design little things for the community on Thingiverse, you cannot ever share it to allow commercial use or make it open source/free domain.

3 Counterparty risk. A couple of years ago, Fusion tried removing the ability to export STEP files with the personal use licence. STEP files (Standard for the Exchange of Product data) are CAD files which are highly transferable between CAD software, since the file format contains the important base geometry information, whereas a .stl is just a triangle mesh which approximates geometry. This basically would lock your models into Fusion 360, unless you paid for a commercial licence. As a result some people have moved over to OnShape which is another cloud based platform, but they could just as easily change their rules at some point which they have done already in the past (free designs are now always made public for others to see and download).

FreeCAD is the only software I know of without any such counter party risk, except for maybe some one time purchase software, which is really improtant if you want to build actually open source long term projects. If the main developers leave the project for whatever reason, there will always be other people to continue development or fork the project, so I have no worries about the long term.

I will say FreeCAD was less intuitive for me at first, and I do find the workflow a bit slower compared to Fusion, but my design files are generally much more robust now e.g. I used to reuse sketches a lot in Fusion, and they would become crowded and generally break later steps when I modified them. FreeCAD generally forces you to do a new sketch for each operation, which feels tedious at first but much more robust in the long run once you get the hang of  the workflow, making a master sketch and then building other sketches on top of it.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I am using Alibre Atom3D.  There are probably tools that are more convenient out there, but you buy it once, the price is reasonable, and you don't have to worry about license changes locking you out of your software.  In theory they could change the license in a newer version but they can't force the "upgrade" on you like one of the cloud based services can.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

@netpackrat -

Never heard of this software before. Currently using FreeCad and finding it mostly okay for what I do. Still learning and looking at options and Alibre Atom3D is interesting. Bookmarked their site and will download the free trial when I can make some time.

What other CAD programs do you or have you used and why do you favor this one?

Thanks for the heads-up.

Cheers

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @randym9

@netpackrat -

Never heard of this software before. Currently using FreeCad and finding it mostly okay for what I do. Still learning and looking at options and Alibre Atom3D is interesting. Bookmarked their site and will download the free trial when I can make some time.

What other CAD programs do you or have you used and why do you favor this one?

Thanks for the heads-up.

Cheers

This is my first foray into 3D CAD to be honest.  Prior CAD experience was taking a 1 credit "Beginning Autocad" course my freshman year of college (1993, Autocad version 10), and a few years later I did some 2D stuff laying out patterns for metal brackets and such in Autocad LT.  Then I didn't mess with CAD for close to 15 years while everything changed.  Before buying a copy of the Alibre software, I briefly looked at Blender (yikes) and Freecad which I probably didn't spend enough time trying to figure out.  The subscription model of software licensing gets a hard pass from me and I don't want to spend a bunch of time learning software only to have Autodesk yank the rug out from under me.

A machinist friend of mine had been printing for probably a year or so and recommended the Alibre software.  This is the same guy who tried to talk me out of the Prusa and into an Ender but I have been fairly happy with the software advice so far.  I am still a fairly primitive user of Atom3D and need to spend more time just focusing on how to use more of the convenience functions to get more efficient with it.  But I can generally draw what I want to with it given enough time and head scratching.

Mostly I design things to help me in my workshop or items for the printers.  I have put most of it up on Printables and while I don't have a huge number of downloads, I have gotten a few good comments about some of my stuff.  Which is kind of nice given that it's all just stuff I made for my own use.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @netpackrat

I am using Alibre Atom3D. 

It's Windows only and you have to pay for updates every year. You could stay with the old version if there are no security issues or bugs which preventing you from work.

Do you know any difference between their products Atom 3D and Design Pro?

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @nikolai

It's Windows only and you have to pay for updates every year. You could stay with the old version if there are no security issues or bugs which preventing you from work.

Do you know any difference between their products Atom 3D and Design Pro?

At current pricing, about $500.  Usually more.  Beyond that, I didn't dig into what the differences were.  I looked at some videos on YT of Atom3D being used, and it looked like it would do what I needed.  And I knew that my buddy who had zero cad background was able to use it to reverse engineer some parts for his shaper, so it had that going for it.

Yeah, it's windoze only which I'm not totally happy about, but given that my primary computer is a 13" Macbook, I was going to need something else for doing CAD no matter what, for display size if nothing else.  While I would prefer to use OSX (or even some other flavor of unix although it has been a while since I messed with Linux), it's not a religious preference or anything.  And just from my casual look at what was out there for the Mac, it looked like a solid meh.

So that's how I came to be running Alibre Atom3D on a refurb HP desktop machine with a reasonable sized screen.  Yeah, there will be updates which I can choose to buy or not to buy.  I suppose some security issue could come up but I don't use that computer for anything besides CAD or 3d printing related stuff.  A bug that would prevent me from using it seems fairly unlikely.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Rhino for work, Fusion 360 for personal stuff.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I’m running FreeCad (and PD) on a 13” MacBook Air with a 27” monitor,external keyboard, mouse, etc. It runs fast enough and with no glitching so I’m good with that.

PC kills Alibre for me and I’m not doing an emulator at this point. Disappointing but, it is what it is.

Totally agree about the subscription model; not for me. I’ve managed to eschew LightRoom for this long so I’m not about to join a CAD subscription plan of any flavor. I only got into all this out of curiosity and to learn something new. This is supposed to be fun, I’m not making money so investing in software isn’t in the cards for now.

I know some professional designers so if I need something beyond my limited skill set, so I’ve got that going for me…

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

Cheers

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

Posted by: @randym9

I’m running FreeCad (and PD) on a 13” MacBook Air with a 27” monitor,external keyboard, mouse, etc. It runs fast enough and with no glitching so I’m good with that.

I briefly considered doing something like that, but decided it would be less of a pain overall to just add a cheap PC to go with all of the added peripherals.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

I'm on a Pee-Cee, and hate it.  But, support for my 3dconnexion toys, which I love, is sketchy on the Mac at the moment.

RE: What 3D design software are people using?

@netpackrat -

Yeah, that makes total sense. 

I’ve been a Mac user since 2010 so just using what I already have. 

I had an HP laptop for work but always kept my work PC and personal Mac completely separate. With an IT department to support the PC platform, I didn’t have to put any effort into running it. 

Since retiring and turning the HP back to the company last year, I don’t want to have to deal with an alternate OS and hardware platform, unless there’s a compelling reason to do so. So no more windows for me for now. But I respect your decision. I always appreciate your perspective on things.

BTW, I meant PS (PrusaSlicer), not PD in my prior post…

Cheers