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!
Personally I use Blender, because I used it in uni for gamedev 3d modelling. It’s a bit finnicky to be honest, but not as bad as freecad. There is also a plugin which introduces CAD like workflows to blender if that is important to you. https://www.cadsketcher.com/
FreeCAD is insane. It is absolutelty unworkable and unintuitive for me.
OpenSCAD is very cool for certain projects.
I’ve been wanting to try out https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux
I find it pretty workable for most of my cases, but have to look up how to solve certain things. I am doing fairly simple stuff though, and I don’t have any other references except some SolidWorks back in high school ages ago. But it gets me fairly easily to where I want to be, and it is FOSS which is important to me - I don’t want to lock my workflow into a software suite that may do a major rugpull at any given moment. I have experienced that before.
I didn’t start using it until after the 1.0 release - apparently there were some major improvements to the usability with that release. Did you try it after?
yep, I tried it fairly recently.
I agree with you on a philosophical level. But ignoring that, if it’s only about prpductivity shaper or fusion are way ahead compared to open source. I’d say you can work at least twice as fast in those.
And freecad slows me down way too much because of how unintuitive it is for me. If I only restrict myself to open source, blender has a way better UX.