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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[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 51 points 6 days ago (6 children)

FreeCAD all the way.

The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.

Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that's not what it's for.

Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.

That leaves FreeCAD.

[–] Dimand@aussie.zone 2 points 6 days ago

Blender has a decent cam processor add-on. Solve space and openSCAD are other very good parametric CAD programs.

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