Hey there! As a 3D printer addict I do a lot of small parts in CAD to print and use around the house. Lately I’ve been exploring all sorts of CAD software since finding out there’s a more around than just Fusion360 and Onshape so I started exploring what’s out there and jotting down my impressions.
Hope this is not spam, just want to help people see what’s around and help them pick!
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I use Tinkercad for simple stuff, FreeCAD for complex parts, and Blender for anything requiring sculpting. As a 3d printing hobbyist I can’t justify the price of commercial CAD software. I prefer open source when a good option is available. FreeCAD took a little getting used to, but it’s got everything you might need to create a part or mechanism for printing. Tinkercad is great for real quick simple stuff, and for blending simple models together. Software is a tool, and you need a specific tool for each specific task. Blender is the best free 3d sculpting software I’ve found.
I would also recommend checking out SALOME for 3D modeling. I’ve been using the shaper toolbox to create geometry for fluid simulations and it’s worked well for me. The shaper toolbox is parametric (as opposed to SALOME’s geometry toolbox which is not).
After you’ve created your geometry in shaper you switch to the mesh toolbox to create your stl file. I think there’s really good control over the triangle creations with SALOME. For example, you can specify edges and faces you want smaller triangles in (like around tight geometries, holes, etc). I’ve been able to get much higher quality stl files with this method than with freecad.
SALOME is free and open source software.
SALOME is definitely on my list along CAD Builder, which as far as I could see seems a more streamlined version of SALOME 9.09 focused on part modeling (at least from my 5 min quick look)
FreeCad, because it’s open-source and work great on Linux. Took me 1-2 week to understand how to use it!
Unfortunately there aren’t a whole lot of good options. They’re either commercial and therefore potentially cost $$$ (or are time limited or otherwise restricted), or they’re free and kind of suck in one way or another.
Of the commercial offerings I like OnShape. I think Fusion 360 is fine too. They’re WAY more powerful than anyone needs for just designing 3D parts but they’re still powerful, well designed tools. I think if your needs are simple and you don’t care a great deal about complex shapes then Tinkercad is great too.
Of the opensource, FreeCAD is the closest to OnShape / Fusion 360. It’s a parametric modeller like they are but the user interface that throws every button in your face at once and doesn’t bother to sort them very well or provide context. It’s not an intuitive or forgiving tool and really needs a usability makeover to make it as simple as the commercial equivalents. I’ve never had much success with it because of this.
Blender is pretty popular for modelling. It’s not really CAD so it’s likely more useful for modelling free form / artistic stuff. The UI is pretty complex but it is extremely powerful.
OpenSCAD is pretty neat if you want to create something by essentially programming a shape and rendering it. It works well for certain kinds of geometric designs that are better expressed in code. e.g. maybe you have to punch 100 holes in a spiral pattern on the side of a box or something.
On the FOSS side I also like SolveSpace but I think its limitations and attitude from the team are holding it back. For simple project I’d even prefer it to FreeCAD to be honest, it tends to trip up way less!
This is a field where free software is unfortunately way worse than the paid options, and all the paid options are expensive.
If you are still a student, you can get SolidWorks for 100 USD a year, or Creo, Inventor, or Solid Edge for free. Completely non-commercial though.
If you are serious about this, get a SolidWorks permanent standard license (it’s like 4 thousand USD?) or ZW3D permanent license which is just a bit cheaper, it’s a relatively new Chinese company though, so a bit of jankiness is expected, but up to you if you want to try them out.
I’ve tried ZW3D. What I can say is it looks like NX. I’m familiar with it cause I use NX before. And it capable doing g3 continuity. As far as I know it has good price, permanent license, and maintenence skip (just skip maintenance and after years just pay 1 time maintenence fee you will get the latest version). It is not as good as Siemens NX, needs more fix/features here and there. But it has potential in the future.
But for hobbyist I’ll recomend Solid Edge Community Edition, because it has no limitations besides for non-commercial use. This one is really powerfull if you can use sync tech mainly for prismatic modeling. And 2024 version has been launched, just wait it till community edition will be updated.
Creo I never touch it so can’t say about it. But I like the UI. PTC has Onshape (cloud based CAD) too if you want to try, just register and open/design using your web browser. But for free account your model will be public, if you have academic/edu email you can use it to register and your file will remain private.
Inventor, I have tried but didn’t like it.
There are Alibre for affordable price. Also there are T-flex and Kompas 3D (russian made).
If you like direct editing based CAD (history free) there is Ansys SpaceClaim. *(Solid Edge is kind of hybrid can do Sync/history free and Ordered parametric).
CMIIW
Excellent information on most of the CAD packages!
Solid Edge is available for free for non-commercial use to everyone, I’m almost done writing its article and it looks really good tbh!
Never heard of ZW3D, sadly the pricing seem a bit steep for what I’m looking for :S
Do write a bit on synchronous modeling.
It’s up! Let me know if you have anything I should look at correcting
Looks good to me.
You can use Lemmy as your comment section. Would like to see you try out more CAD software, since this place really needs original content to grow.
Oh that’s a neat idea, I was exploring comment systems but the ones that inspired me (like Cactus Comments which is based on Matrix) I had trouble getting to work. I’ll try setting it up when I get more time!
I generally settled on Fusion360, but Alibre Atom was promising aside from some system stability issues on my desktop. I really wanted to like freeCAD, but I just didn’t have the time to invest in learning its quirks.
I hope I get to revisit it for the series. I had the trial months ago but let it expire without trying it much (had a lot on my plate at the time, plus was having some issues with it). Sadly I could not reset the trial, maybe if I ask kindly they’ll let me have an extra week or something?
I got the impression they probably would especially fall when they seem to do some heavy sales promotions.
If you are an American or Canadian veteran, you can get the educational version of Solidworks for $20 / year. I’m on my 8th or 9th year of using it.
Just pirate solidworks and enjoy industry standard. Free software is 10 years behind and cheaper alternatives are still expensive.
I read that Dassault is quite active in tracking down pirates, and honestly I don’t see the need to resort to potentially installing malware (how much ethics can you expect from random torrents anyway) when the free alternatives seem good enough?
They are not good enough, not even close, at least not for me…unfortunately. Its not random torrent btw, solidsquad (probably guys from DS) are releasing every single version. If you are satisfied with free alternatives then look no further. Using it since 2008 and even that old version is much more advanced compared to anything thats free today. Cant wait when foss reach that level, but Im afraid Im too old for that
Blender works fine idk why everybody here saying there aren’t good alternatives
This looks interesting, thanks for sharing! I’ve played around a bit in Tinkercad (too limited) and Fusion 360 (complicated) but haven’t found something that feels right yet. I bookmarked this to follow what you find!
I’d suggest giving Onshape a look, it’s the more user friendly and intuitive of the ones I’ve tried yet.
If you have an iPad with a Apple Pencil, Shapr3D has a really neat UI (it uses touch and pencil interactions distinctly) but having to pay a subscription just for exporting was too much of an ask for me. They seem to have different pricing now with a free tier and a Windows app (I don’t have an iPad anymore) so I might cover it later on.
