this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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3DPrinting

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I visited a friend who is a professional medical engineer, and watched him work on a 3D design on some software paid for my the university they worked at. The options and features looked very practical!

Although I am not even close to working on so complicated projects, I did love the funtionalities. So now i have decided to put in the effort and learn a decent program, instead of using Tinkercad. I have been very happy with Tinkercad, but some things are only doable with workarounds or very creative methods.

The question is, what software should i start learning?

-FreeCAD
-Fusion 360
-AutoCAD
-Sketchup
-Blender
-LibreCAD
-Something else entirely?

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[–] asbestos@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

FreeCAD is open source, free, and recently released a big update that made it much better. Fusion is in a enshittification spiral.

[–] bradley@techhub.social 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

@asbestos @cosmicrookie second the FreeCAD recommend. Started with it as a complete beginner and really enjoy it

Edit - I started just after the mentioned update

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

I'll third it, I used Solidworks before, freecad was fairly easy to adapt to before the 1.0 release, workflow is even nicer now, trying to convince my dad to move to freecad over paying for a sw subscription now that he's retired.

[–] cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I believe that most, if not all of the ones that i listed, should be free, or at least have a very useful free version. Freecad I have heard a lot of though, and I see a lot of video tutorials on it, so it would be a good option!