Hello 3d printing community! I’m a complete newb and I am planning on doing a lot of 3d printing in the coming months.
I wanted to get into 3d printing with the intention of designing a lot of models and printing them for use around the house. So, I wanted to ask what people typically use for designing their own models to print?
Ideally the software would support both Windows and Mac as that’s what I typically use these days. Let me know, thanks!
Update
First of all, thank you everyone for weighing in here!
Set aside some time last night and played with both Fusion 360 and FreeCAD since those two software kept popping up in the answers. My initial impressions of Fusion 360 was not great. I’m not sure if it’s just the Mac version but the software was a bit laggy and at the end of my session it froze. Otherwise it worked fine and I was able to make a prototype with it and I would have finished it if the program didn’t freeze.
Next I tried FreeCAD. I think the UX is definitely worse than Fusion 360, however I will say it was fast and I did not notice any lag. I admit that my initial impression of it was not good. The second I opened a fresh install of FreeCAD it was already erroring. I watched some tutorials. It definitely suffered from the issue some issues pointed out in the comments where the program has a ton of tutorials but none are really for the latest version so you kind of have to figure out the “modern way” to achieve what the tutorial is telling you to do. It also seems to have some weird bugs. I ran into one where sometimes I had to repeat an action for it to work. No idea why. Otherwise I was able to design a decently complicated prototype in it. I could see myself using it long term for sure.
I saw some programs mentioned where you would basically create models by writing code. If I have time, I will try some of those next. I’m not that into programming though /s.
Start with tinkercad. Upgrade to fusion 360. For sculpting , blender.
To use blender you need a high end PC. Like a gaming PC.
Fusion and blender are both incredibly complex softwares that do a lot of things and take a lot of invested time to learn but there are tons of tutorial videos and online communities for both.
For a step between Tinkercad and Fusion 360, you can check out MatterControl.
It is like Tinkercad but way more options and runs locally. Works great for more artistic shapes that are hard in CAD software.
Hadn’t heard of this. I’ll check it out. Fusion has been a bit intimidating. Ive made a few things in it but found it confusing and not intuitive like tinkercad.
I think Ive spent all my energy on learning Blender and not much left to dedicate to a better CAD program.
You don’t need a powerful computer for blender unless you’re doing rendering or sculping or working with really high poly models. Especially when compared to proper CAD packages. I do a lot of design work in blender and my computer is so unstressed by it I can hear the CPU chirping when I rotate the viewport.
It’s worth learning the basics of a parametric CAD but blender will do virtually everything faster and give you greater freedom and control over the exact geometry it outputs.
Sculpting. Yeah that requires a high end PC.
I have a 12g GPU. 64gb ram. Ddr5. Ryzen 7 CPU.
And it still struggles some times, mostly when using the bolean modifer (the one that combines parts or makes cutouts). Which is something you will use a lot for 3d printing model design.
If you aren’t sculpting, but just cad stuff. You should use a different program.
Blender can do some of that but why not use a software designed for cad. ?
Blender isn’t a cad program.
Also I posted a recent 3d project a month ago. (My lastest post). Most of the was made in blender.
I ended up with 3 blender files. 7gb each. For various parts.
Because of the complexity of the model and making it fit mechanical parts there was multiple versions of each part.
All high resolution.
I had to keep making new files cause after the files get around 8gb , then everything is a slog to do in the software. So I had a head file. A body file. And a inside parts file.
No one could make that cat clock on a PC with out high specs. Impossible.