I’m using Fusion360, and I dislike it for a lot of reasons, but it’s easy to use. I tried FreeCAD, but it was very janky in comparison. Shapr3D was surprisingly good, but there’s no way I’m paying monthly for my hobby usage. I need precision prints, so I can’t just use Blender or similar.
Is there some magical unicorn software I’m not finding?
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FreeCAD, but basically because it was free and open source when I started learning (which wasn’t long ago anyways)
FreeCAD. Anything that’s not opensource is basically using you for some nefarious purpose. You’re a product or a product in the making or you’re making a product for them…you could be training a CAD AI to end all CAD.
FreeCAD is us. You use it, if you find a problem you report it or fix it. That simple. Your CAD files don’t die because the company changed CEO or died.
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. FreeCAD is steadily getting better and better.
OnShape. If you’re familiar with Fusion360, OnShape requires almost no additional learning. Workflows are pretty much the exact same. It’s free under the guise that everything you make is OnShapes IP. But if you’re looking to model casually and aren’t making things you wish to patent, it’s great.
Not open source if that’s a requirement.
I think the free version is more nuanced then that. By using the free version you agree to:
1.Use it for non commercial projects.
2 Place your designs in the public domain for anyone to use. Any design created from a free account is made public and may be used by others.
I didn’t dig too deep so I’m not sure what restraints are placed on anyone using your design.
But at no point is Onshape claiming ownership of your design.
It’s free under the guise that everything you make is OnShapes IP.
This sounds insanely predatory and messed up. Is this not as absolutely nuts as it sounds? O.o
Just make a tool, and take someone else’s work with that tool as your own? For real? This sounds really sus.
Yes, that’s the deal. Pay for it or give up your stuff
Ya agree with ya there
FreeCAD, runs on a damn potato. Fusion bakes it into charcoal instead. At least that is my experience on a kinda low-end laptop.
Oh, fusion is a heavy beast for sure. I just can’t stand FreeCAD’s interface.
I just wish someone would make an open source project with sketch based modeling and…. That’s all! I don’t need materials, rendering etc. I literally only need STL export.
But it needs to be as easy as shapr3d—which is marvelous, but $38usd/m for some stupid reason.
FreeCAD, and I recommend you give it a second try, while watching the excellent tutorials from Deltahedra and Mangojelly on YouTube. Lots of the jank can be avoided if you only know how, so the tutorials are extremely useful.
FreeCAD has gotten exponentially better with each release the last few years, and both active developers and funding/donations from users have increased exponentially. The future is bright. And unlike the “free” commercial programs, FreeCAD is immune to future rug-pulls and enshitification.
You might also want to try https://dune3d.org/ , a relatively new 3D CAD software
No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.
FreeCAD has possibly the worst UI I have ever used combined with some of the worst UX of any software. But it has every feature I need, it’s free and it works (mostly).
I haven’t used it in awhile, but OnShape I think had the best UI, for being in a browser.
There are some macros out there I’ve found that make FreeCAD a lot better. I kinda wish they had a half-decent reference for macro writing; they’ll point you to their unfinished out of date wiki if you ask.
Omg. I swear they rename/move a bunch of things every update so every guide is just a little bit out of date.
The answer they give you is “If you want it written, YOU write it.” Which…it’s no wonder open source software doesn’t hold up, right? It’s made by idiots who think it’s up to end users to write the manual.
Idk Creo has pretty awful UX
100% this. Ive been through 4 different cad packages professionally and every single one of them is terrible bad awful garbage. Pick your flavor of garbage and get with it.
After a few months of forcing myself to learn it, FreeCAD really isn’t that bad. It’s miles better than Creo.
OpenScad because I do simple things like funnels or part bins.
90% fusion
9% tinkercad
1% dicking around in OnShape, getting frustrated, and giving up
I use FreeCAD.
I follow Mango Jelly Solutions and DeltaHedra on YouTube for tutorials.
I’ve had excellent results designing items for 3D prints.
Mango’s videos are great. I’d wager there are gems in there for even experienced users of freecad. I’m often surprised by some of the tricks he has.
There are gems. I sometimes need to do things I don’t often do in FreeCAD. A quick refresher from Mango, and I’m back in the groove.
FreeCAD. It’s janky, absolutely, but it’s quite powerful once you get used to it. Improved a lot with the latest major update as well.
I also tried OpenSCAD for a bit. As someone with a programming background, I really like the principle of how it works. But ultimately, I found it way too limiting.
I used OpenSCAD for a bit, and it’s good for simple things where clicking is far less efficient. I once needed a plate with a set of holes. OpenSCAD was great.
Look up how to use FreeCAD’s spreadsheet.
What sort of precision are you not getting from blender?
Once you set the parameters (I set mine to mm), I have found it to be accurate enough to make additional tools with which to measure.
Mind you, I don’t need accuracy down past a mm.
I like using Blender too. Granted, I’m already somewhat familiar with it for art purposes. But just for STLs, if you know what you’re doing you can actually get away with quite a bit using a boolean CAD-like workflow!
I absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it
I was learning with freecad.
Tried to defeature the screw holes on Steam Controller model and it crashed the application :/
I’m still learning so I have no idea how to do that manually :<
SolidWorks and Creo primarily, if I don’t want to boot into Windows I’ve been using OnShape recently.
I’m using OpenSCAD because I want to program a fish!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Over time, I’ve come to hate doing things in the “productivity-via-point-and-click-adventure” model. I very much think the use cases where the mouse is actually necessary are way slimmer than people really think.
If FreeCAD and similar tools take the approach of the “potter” paradigm where you connect your brain to the medium via your fingers as directly as possible even if the medium is digital/virtual (like most of the CAD programs out there), OpenSCAD is more of a “dark factory” paradigm where you externalize a piece of your mind/expertise into a program that encodes all of your expertise and the program acts on the medium on your behalf. (And in the case of OpenSCAD, the program is kindof “made of the same thing as the medium itself.”)
In the “potter” paradigm:
- You end up with a finished product, but devoid of any accounting of the decisions which went into making the finished product.
- Your metaphysical “finger prints” make it into the end product. The tiniest twitch of a finger is reflected in the final product, even if it’s an unconscious motion.
- Altering earlier steps that came earlier in the process isn’t as easy. Think of a painter layering paints to capture the subtle tones of human skin and then deciding that four layers down they wish they’d done something different. To fix it, they’d have to cover part of the image and redo all the steps manually. (And yes, undo chains attempt mitigate this somewhat, but imperfectly since reapplying later steps isn’t necessarily perfect.)
- Excessive precision isn’t typically possible.
- Making another, similar asset is a manual process that can’t reuse the steps/expertise that went into building previous ones cleanly.
- There’s no time spent after finishing your work where the computer has to work/chug to produce the finished product.
- Parameterized builds are less natural.
- For digital assets, almost always involves using a pointing device.
In the “dark factory” paradigm:
- You end up not just with a finished product, but also a program that gives much more insight into how the product was built and what decisions were made in the process of constructing it.
- Only conscious decisions go into the final product.
- Altering earlier steps can be done much more cleanly and later steps can be written in such a way that they “automatically” inherit properties introduced by changes in earlier steps.
- Perfection(ism?) by default. The perfect may be at risk of becoming the enemy of the good.
- Later, similar assets can reuse the logic from earlier assets where there are similarities.
- You might spend some time waiting for your program to finish running before your asset is ready.
- Parameterization is like breathing. It’s arguably easier than not parameterizing.
- Requires no mouse or pointing device. Just a text editor.
And mind you, a lot of programs try to kindof live somewhere in the middle. Being extremely mouse-driven while still supporting parameterization. Or doing sophisticated things with
I’m not trying to advocate against the “potter” paradigm. There are benefits and drawbacks to both. And I can’t bash just doing what works for you. But a) the “potter” paradigm doesn’t work for me very well at all and the “dark factory” paradigm does and b) I very much believe that the “dark factory” paradigm is so underserved as to be nearly non-existent. I know of OpenSCAD (and ImplicitCAD and a few others in the CAD space) and Graphviz and a few others that were suggested to me in this comment tree. And CodeComic which I personally wrote. And I’m working on another such DSL for making 3D models/assets for games and 3D animations. (Think “art” rather than “engineering”. FreeCAD is to OpenSCAD as Blender is to what I’m building. Yes I’m planning to Open Source it in the near-ish future.) But there’s so little in that realm.
So, as you can imagine I really love OpenSCAD. I’d be very surprised to find myself using anything else for CAD in the future that wasn’t a DSL.
P.S. Maybe I should start a blog. Heh.
+1 for OpenSCAD! If you have experience with scripting/coding, it feels really comfy. There’s a nice wikibook that taught me the basics.
The full release hasn’t been updated since 2021, so I highly recommend running a development snapshot. The preview and rendering are much more performant. Enable the “manifold” engine if it’s not on by default.
It works fine OOTB, but I customized it a bit to match my workflow: I use vim with an LSP as the text editor, and I use git to track my changes.
Now I’ve began using bosl2 in most of my projects. It has a lot of QOL features and can save a lot of work.
I love OpenSCAD because not only can I easily parameterize things, and define libraries for commonly used stuff but I can also combine it with my Git setup to get all the benefits of code provenance and backups and change sets and such.
