this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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3DPrinting

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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!

Update

First of all, thank you everyone for weighing in here!

Set aside some time last night and played with both Fusion 360 and FreeCAD since those two software kept popping up in the answers. My initial impressions of Fusion 360 was not great. I'm not sure if it's just the Mac version but the software was a bit laggy and at the end of my session it froze. Otherwise it worked fine and I was able to make a prototype with it and I would have finished it if the program didn't freeze.

Next I tried FreeCAD. I think the UX is definitely worse than Fusion 360, however I will say it was fast and I did not notice any lag. I admit that my initial impression of it was not good. The second I opened a fresh install of FreeCAD it was already erroring. I watched some tutorials. It definitely suffered from the issue some issues pointed out in the comments where the program has a ton of tutorials but none are really for the latest version so you kind of have to figure out the "modern way" to achieve what the tutorial is telling you to do. It also seems to have some weird bugs. I ran into one where sometimes I had to repeat an action for it to work. No idea why. Otherwise I was able to design a decently complicated prototype in it. I could see myself using it long term for sure.

I saw some programs mentioned where you would basically create models by writing code. If I have time, I will try some of those next. I'm not that into programming though /s.

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[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

FreeCAD is insane. It is absolutelty unworkable and unintuitive for me.

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?

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Alright, that's fair. I have been planning on trying the CAD-plugins for Blender as well. I love Blender, and it is easy to use except when it comes to CAD-stuff. I've also been wanting to try out OpenSCAD.

I like that FreeCAD seems to have quite some steam and hopefully it will only improve going forward.