[Closed] Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner  

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Actually I like the cloud service in Fusion 360. Me and my wife can modify same objects. They don't have to be public (private by default)
And the program is always up-to-date. It's perfect for our private needs.

Perhaps you've been lucky using their cloud, I wish I had. What often happens with me is my updates fail to save to the cloud, so when you fire it up the next time you are greeted with the "backup" message. They are supposedly implementing an option so that you can save things locally, due to overwhelming popular demand, but I won't hold my breath.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

I had never this kind of problems. Maybe you have a bad network connection, so the files are not being synchronised. You have always the option to export to be on the safe side.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

I had never this kind of problems. Maybe you have a bad network connection, so the files are not being synchronised. You have always the option to export to be on the safe side.

I'm not the only user with this problem. Who knows what it is, except it's not my network connection.

Anyhow, the more I use F360 the more frustrated I become. Mainly stupid things, features that they appear to have started to implement then got bored (left the feature in an almost unusable state) and moved to something else, in the ever eternal race to add as many features as they possibly can. 🙄 I can give two examples of such just off the top of my head, printing models/sketches and the user parameter list. 😡

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

On a more constructive note, for those still looking for beginner cad software I found this https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/mechanical-software

I have watched a few vids on it and it appears very intuitive. I hope to try it myself very soon.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

SketchUp is very simple/intuitive to learn and use, but a bit limited. FreeCAD is more powerful, but harder to learn, and a little buggy.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Hi ALL,

This is my first post. I am 72 years young and ordered my first 3d Printer (i3 mk3 KIT) less than a week ago. I have been lurking on this forum for several days, trying to learn more. This is the first topic that I felt I might be qualified to respond to. I have been using Fusion 360 for a little more than a year. I have tried several CAD modeling programs were "Free as in Freedom" and some that were only "Free as in Free Beer". By far Fusion 360 has to be one of the best "Free for the Hobbyist" I have found. When I started F360 it was very tied to the cloud. But it has changed a lot now and I have worked on models for a week at the time and not reconnected to the net. Software up dates are weekly. The help from the forum is great and responses are fast. If you have a problem, there's dozens more that have already had the same problem and someone has offered the solution. It has a Sculpt mode for modeling which I have not used, but will try it now before my printer arrives. There is nothing quite as forgiving as Parametric CAD.

Disclaimer: "I don't work for Autodesk or anyone else for that matter."

BTW: "Free as in Freedom" more than 50% of my decision to buy Prusa.
I think I am going to buy my grand daughter a 3d Printer. She has become quite a good little artist and I would like to see her get into 3d and F360. "I have been using Fusion 360 since I was 13 years old" could look quite good on a future resume.

Bob

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Hi ALL,

This is my first post. I am 72 years young and ordered my first 3d Printer (i3 mk3 KIT) less than a week ago. I have been lurking on this forum for several days, trying to learn more. This is the first topic that I felt I might be qualified to respond to. I have been using Fusion 360 for a little more than a year.

Firstly, congratulations on your purchase and impending delivery. I am sure you will have many hours (and a few frustrating moments) of happy printing.

Secondly, commiserations on using F360 for that length of time 😛

Autodesk have been touting a major update to F360 in the very near future. Let's hope they stick to their word and clean up the areas that they have f***ed up over the years. Fingers crossed.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Inventor is what i use, offline and easy to use

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

SketchUp is very simple/intuitive to learn and use, but a bit limited. FreeCAD is more powerful, but harder to learn, and a little buggy.

After some more playing around, I concluded that:
- SketchUp has fatal flaws - when moving shapes around, they merge and lose their original identity. So it's very hard to edit things afterwards.
- SketchUp also produces non-manifold shapes often, which need repair before slicing.
- And it doesn't write STL files, so there's another step..
- FreeCAD has a lot of parts that don't work well together, and the constraint-based sketching is buggy.
- Fusion360 is slow, since it's all web-based, and you're stuffed without a fast internet connection. It also doesn't write STL.

So I wrote my own! It aims to address some annoyances of those. (annoyances to me, anyway…) and be of use particularly to 3D printing. There is an installer at https://github.com/gilesp1729/LoftyCAD . It is not at all complete, and therefore I’m actively working on it and will track all issues and fix things. It is, of course, open source and free for all.

If you play with it and find an issue, or just have a curious question, open an issue on github or reply here.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

[...] I think I am going to buy my grand daughter a 3d Printer. She has become quite a good little artist and I would like to see her get into 3d and F360. "I have been using Fusion 360 since I was 13 years old" could look quite good on a future resume.Definitely do this. One of the best decisions I made when my youngest was 3 1/2 was to let the kids have the "good" computer in the house. That decision has paid of many times. At 27, he doesn't have to worry about putting experience on his resume. He's the co-founder of a startup and doing what he loves. I can only imagine what being agile with such tools will do for kids today in the future. Instead of "I wish I could buy that", they'll be thinking "I can make that!"

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

+1 for Fusion360
Lars is doing a great job to help beginners dive into it. It helped me a lot to bypass the entry scariness
Another +1 for Fusion 360 and Lars' excellent series. Fusion 360 is deep and powerful, but the basics aren't hard to pick up. Sitting back and watching Lars' tutorials usually has me chomping at the bit to get behind they keyboard to start putting the knowledge to use.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

[...]
- Fusion360 is slow, since it's all web-based, and you're stuffed without a fast internet connection. It also doesn't write STL.
I find the speed in Fusion 360 has more to do with my computer's horsepower than the web connection. Everything runs locally until it's time to save or download something. Once cached locally, old stuff opens quickly.

Not sure what you mean about "doesn't write STL" though. I routinely export my designs as STLs using the "Make" button.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Not sure what you mean about "doesn't write STL" though. I routinely export my designs as STLs using the "Make" button.

Sorry, my bad. Was thinking of something else entirely...

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Actually I like the cloud service in Fusion 360. Me and my wife can modify same objects. They don't have to be public (private by default)
And the program is always up-to-date. It's perfect for our private needs.

Perhaps you've been lucky using their cloud, I wish I had. What often happens with me is my updates fail to save to the cloud, so when you fire it up the next time you are greeted with the "backup" message. They are supposedly implementing an option so that you can save things locally, due to overwhelming popular demand, but I won't hold my breath.

Being a noob, I had the same problem. I found that the way around that is to "export" your model, which you can do to a local file. I don't even use the save function anymore. Now everything is export/import.

Re: Easy program to DESIGN my own stuff for Beginner

Yeh had problems with AutoCAD. The 3DPrint function gives a splash screen about 3D print services STLOUT however works a dream apart from deleting arrays from the model but they are included in the STL. So I just hit undo after an STLOUT and everything is fine. Only change I have made is my template has FACETRES set to 10 rather than 0.5 so by default it will generate hi-res STLS.

Regards,
Martin