free modeling, drawing, cad programs?

Sketch up?
Fusion 360?
or ????

small 3d printer use. Possible send off for remote cnc, laser cut etc.

Not super familiar with any of these so starting from mostly scratch. I know a little cad and how to draw by hand.

Which one should I focus on?

 

Don’t laugh, but for simple stuff, I can use Tinkercad super quick and be printing right away. I also have Fusion 360 but just started with the tutorials and never got through them.

 

I vote for Fusion 360. I have tried about all of them. I use Autodesk Inventor for work tho. Fusion 360 is made by same folks. I think 360 is easier to understand. I wish there was a free version that was not Web based. If it was an app on your computer it would be great. They offer that but at a high $$$$$ amount.

 

solidworks has a $99 / yr license for tinkerers

3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers | SOLIDWORKS

not a bad deal, assuming they allow all features.

 

A couple of useful pages (a few ads will pop up)
The Top 10 Free 3D Modeling Software for Beginners in 2022 | All3DP
The Best 3D Printer Filament Types in 2022 | All3DP

 

Can you eloborate?
I have a Fusion legacy seat but hate that it's cloud based
I'd love to have a local version but didn't think they offered that

 

Fusion is a great and powerful option if you can stand the cloud. Freecad is one I've been playing around with lately. Pretty decent, but a bit limited in areas. Never used tinkercad, but it has a decent following amongst youtubers. Blender is another free modeling program and there are some new parametric modeling plugins that look pretty promising. I'm just wetting my toes with blender, so I'm not at all proficient with it yet, but it shows promise for some of the more artsy stuff I do sometimes.

I primarily use Rhino though. It's not free, but it's cheap @1k, and a very powerful modeling and surfacing program. Also has a ton of good built in translators too. Not parametrical though (well it CAN be in a way, but it's cumbersome) so it's a bit tough and frustrating for a beginner to dive in and get comfortable. I've been a user since 2.0 in 2004 so I've grown up with it's quirks and oddities.

 

I’ve dabbled with blender too. It worked well for photo / phone scans of objects to sculpt and clean up the model for printing.

 

Fusion and deal with the cloud lol. I have Inventor for work and between school years ago with full tilt Solidworks and Inventor for work; I loath the thought of the day I have to give up the good stuff lol.

 

F360 is REALLY good for what it is.

I use Solidworks and CREO mostly.

However, I did start out on Solid Edge and have always been a fan of that particular software.

If you're looking to tinker, would vote F360.

 

Hey Dan, you ever hear of, or use a Microscribe contact digitizer? We've had one laying around in the office, but don't have anything it will interface with. Used to use it with Surfcam, but we abandoned that when we went to Powermill.

 

I've heard of them, but never used or seen one in real life. They are popular amongst Rhino users as I think it was first designed to use Rhino as it's digitizing software. Not sure it they still do or if they've rolled their own. Look into getting a seat of Rhino and I'm sure you could put it to use again.

 

Come to think of it, I think we got Rhino when we bought it. But then we shifted to parametric software, and Rhino was more along the lines of EZCam and early Surfcam. We also used wind up computers back then.....

 

lol. Ya, rhino is just an old dumb modeler. They've added some parametrics with grasshoper, but it's cumbersome, and they also have the "record history" command, but again, cumbersome and not at all intuitive. I really wish they'd come out with a fully parametric version someday as I'm a big fan of the program. It's still got a loyal cult like following though from many industries. And still my preferred software of choice for surface modeling and all the geometry creation I need to do for the fixtures I machine. For solids and parametric design solidworks is becoming my go-to after our long slow migration away from mechanical desktop. Ya, we were THAT far behind the times here....

 

Yikes...and my guys complain that we're still in SW. My lead design guy wants Creo. I've got 9 seats of SW, so that's a lot of investment to dump to make the change. Then trying to get everyone else up to speed, I figure the actual cost of making the switch would be $200k. I became reasonably proficient doing complex surfaces in SW, but it's way more complicated than doing a solid. My brain is getting too old and rigid, so now I just want the easiest path to a reasonable solution. I think I mentioned somewhere here before, trying to switch my brain to use Fusion is going to cause a stroke.

 

If you are already invested and proficient in SW, I cannot fathom wanting to get into Creo. I have used both, and unless you need to do some really complex surfacing, RUN away from Creo.

 

Trust me, even if it was better, it's hard to do the ROI. We're not doing product design, we're building thermoform molds. He just likes to over-complicate everything. When I design a part, my tree is really short. His....it's like War & Peace. We're not making Swiss watches here. Reduction of development time is key, and he just can't bring himself to 'shortcut' something. I only put up with his insubordinate attitude, because finding people with a brain in their heads is really difficult. Actually, if I was going to switch to something, I'd consider Powershape. For our industry, it had a super powerful tool that really simplified our process. All thermoforms have to have a draft angle on the part, and doing a tangent wall to your Z origin on a 3D surface requires complex surface building in SW. Powershape did it in a few button clicks.

 

That's what our designer was going through trying to learn solidworks. He's old school hack and whack dumb solids, make it look pretty then pass it off to us in the CNC dept to surface correctly. TBH I'm getting a bit stuck in my ways too, when I used to be the one always pushing the future and learning new stuff, but I'm becoming tired of swimming upstream all the time. We're a small shop of 9 old school guys. Old habits die hard. We don't have the budget to just keep throwing money at software solutions. I wanted to go with Keycreator as I found it very intuitive and somewhat similar to mechanical, but he wanted solidworks as there was a ton of youtube videos he could watch when he got stuck on stuff. Almost 2 years later and he hasn't done jack shit with it because he can't figure it out and wants me to hold his hand through everything. The irony is that if we went with keycreator he wouldn't have needed the youtube vids, he would have picked it up a lot quicker......some people you just can't reason with. It would have been cheaper too.

The Owner just retired yesterday, so more work is falling on a few of our shoulders and we need to develop a more efficient process. Everyone looks to me to wave the magic wand, but nobody want's to put any effort in to get anywhere......It's like somebody complaining they never get any faster, but they never go out in practice sessions or ever work on their bike. Frustrating....

 

Have you looked into Cimatron? I used it briefly about 15 years ago, and know a guy that uses it currently for pattern/mould design and it's draft modeling tools are pretty powerful. I found it very frustrating though (I thought differently that how the program worked) for the type of work I was trying to do with it, but its apparently pretty well regarded in the mould industry. Pricey though I think...

I hear you on finding people. We just lost a pretty good programmer a month ago, and decided to promote within as we've got a good keen kid (machinist from the floor) that I know will pick it up fast (and he is so far so good) vs trying to find somebody even remotely capable of doing the work we do the way we do it. We went down that road 6 years ago before we found that guy and it's a process I wish to not repeat anytime soon......The hiring pool for guys like that around here is very shallow, as I know quite a few other shops in the area struggling to find quality guys right now too.

 

It's not that bad but I will admit I spent alot of hours watching Lars Christensen YT videos on F360 to understand it better