Whats the best setup for 3d cad software design

[FortedWS]

I started using Sketchup as I had used it for other modeling, however it has a lot of limitations for working with modeling for 3D printing. Most of those can be summed up in three areas - it does very poorly when handling small items, so it’s best to work on meter scale rather than millimeter, then scale down to .001 using netfabb later when you do your error check. It lacks built-in tools which are useful for 3d models, and as far as I know is nearly impossible to do organic forms. Of those lacking builtin is good error checking for manifold and other printability issues. Lastly, it used to be available for free, but since Google sold it to Trimble, their current EULA states that it is free for only personal use. As soon as you use it to make anything for profit, including uses on 3D Hubs, you must pay for a pro license.

I switched to Fusion 360, and that solves all three points. It’s much more featured for creating models for printing, and you have many ways to achieve that modeling. Until you’ve made a parametric part, however, you don’t know how great this can be. I recently worked up a basic model for a customer with only rough dimensions to go on, was able to show a render of the product and win the bid, then just had to pump in the actual dimensions and go to print once they were provided. And I did this from two locations without any need to transfer files, since everything is cloud based. Best is that the license is free, even for business use provided the business is generating less than $100k/yr of revenue from using the software. Not the whole business revenue (as I understand it) just what is generated from use of their product. In fairness, this is a 1 year renewable license so it’s subject to change at any point, but their full license is only a few hundred dollars per year compared to thousands for other products, including those AutoDesk makes as well. It can also be used with other CNC fabrication machines, and handles the CAM controlling directly without the need to go to another program to generate gcode and cut parts.

I’m sure this is sounding like a sales pitch, but I’m in no way affiliated with AutoDesk or the Fusion 360 team, but I’m very much in love with the product and I barely scratch the surface of what it can do. There may be more powerful CAD tools out there for someone who has put in the time to get a degree in 3D modeling, but Fusion does everything I can dream of and more, and without much headache.

[descobar]

I love using Fusion360. It truly is a great software for beginners and experts.

[ajmadison49]

I use Rhino, and what I like about it, is that command help shows up as soon as you click on a command. Though I admit that I have Rhino primarily because the Mac version (only) was sale priced last year.

But no matter what software you get, you should acquaint yourself with the progression of drawing objects and formats. In short, you start with 2D & 3D objects, surfaces, and solids. You should keep copies of the file as you build up your design, because as you approach generating a Stereo Lithography format (STL) for importing into a slicer program, you need to convert your complete design into one or more watertight meshes. But meshes are painfully difficult to fix if they have any “manifold” problems, so as you attempt to create your mesh, and it has problems, you’ll want to go back to a version of the file that is pre-mesh. If this is a big vocabulary lesson, it is. And I’m just getting started, and no expert, but I have already tried drawing a relatively simple design, got to the STL and found issues that I couldn’t fix because I did not keep any intermediate versions of the drawing.

[av8rt0m]

Tinkercad is easy, free, and fun. Nothing to install and it does most of what the average person would need. I have zero experience but tinkercad and YouTube made it easy.

[Peter_109]

Rhino is great, but you’ll realize that is actually incredibly weak; complex models will often require alot of post production stl work. You find your self mostly using the perspective view frame which makes accuracy horrid.

It is simple to use and pick up, but by fair its best quality is that options in exporting files. Plus the plugins (grasshopper, etc)

[zippi]

I can really recommend Autodesk Inventor. I am using version 2014 since I only got a 32 bit system but you can even get the latest version for free as a student
As some people mentioned before, you can even try Fusion 360 but for that you need a 64 bit system.

With the help of the tutorials and other youtube videos you will get along with that pretty soon

[pri3d]

I love openscad, it’s is a scripting language and it seems perfect for my use…

Philippe

[codemercenary]

FreeCAD! I find the constraint-based sketch editor to be extremely handy. I really do wish that composition of multiple 3D shapes was more powerful, but this is still an excellent tool even for fairly complex parts.

[krosnyak]

Hi, I am surprised that nobody mentioned 123d design from autodesk, it is in my opinion the best entry level software for 3D printing, it is free, and once you master it it is a breeze to jump to Fusion 360 since the interfaces are very similar. Cheers!

[octopuslab]

I have used most of the popular cad softwares until a year ago when I purchased Moi3D and absolutely love it. I don’t even use Sketchup anymore except for architectural design o renderings. It is very easy to use, very accurate and let`s you can make organic shapes. It costs around $300 and for me it was worth every penny.

[catalinmitru]

Hi Chris,

I am using CATIA V5. It’s one of the most powerful CAD tools you can find, but it’s not so easy to use.

It takes a little bit of time until you get to learn it, but once you do everything becomes possible :))

[PlugnMake]

Hi Chris,

I would suggest tinkercad, very nice integration between 123Dapp from Autodesk!

[3Dscaleworks]

Sketcup is very user friendly and with some pugins it works fine

[Cornwallis]

www.shapr3d.com runs only on the ipad Pro but it is a revelation in CAD. See youtube movies on their website. I learned it in about 2 hours time. Very similar as Tinkercad but you draw with a pencil on the ipad and its very natural. Further it has some very interesting features like chamfer round or square depending on the direction you pull the pencil. Unlike Tinkercad, their measures make sense, from the center of a point to the center of another point.

[3Dscaleworks]

Sketcup is very user friendly and with some pugins it works fine

[Tesseract_RP]

I suggest you use Onshape www.onshape.com - it’s a FREE CAD package on the cloud from the team behind Solidworks.

It’s much more powerful than sketchup, ideal for engineering design.

[deonsmt]

+1 For OnShape. It’s very good. If you know Solidworks, Cubify or Geomagic, you are already ahead of the learning curve. Otherwise it’s very easy to pickup and there are tons of resources developed by OnShape to get you up to speed. Minimal computing resources required - as long as you can run Chrome and have a decent (I have 15Mbps and it works fine), you are golden!

The only down side for the free version is that you are limited to 100MB of private storage. This gets eaten up very quickly due to the history feature of OnShape. However, you do get 5GB of public storage which is okay if you don’t mind sharing your designs with the world. These restrictions can be removed by purchasing a license for about $1500. Cheaper than Solidworks but very expensive for a hobbyist or small privately funded startup.

[Iceman24k]

+2 FOR ONSHAPE.COM. Love this program, My cousin suggested this to me, and love it!

[Chris_Chaplin]

Thank you all, its been very useful, alot to take in tinker with, until finding ones you like. , what about pc spec, 16gb ram, 8x 2.3 gh quad processors graphic, setup, whats basic spec, min for all design programs.

thanks chris

[RCole]

I did notice that there was a lot of talk about programs, but little about hardware.

The requirements for a PC will vary depending on how complicated you want to get. Are you a hobbyist, professional? Some programs will not use above 4GB or 8GB of ram. Knowing your software requirements can save you some money (that being said… 16GB will never hurt).

I would focus more on the graphics card. Put your money here. It is most noticeable when doing something like rotating your model. Some of my more complex models have dropped me down to 1 frame a second (very slow rotate), but then, I don’t have the fastest video card. If you decide to use a program like Blender (which I use), stick to an NVidia card since that is the only one that’s fully supported. Again - know your software requirements and recommendations.

Once you decide what software you might want to try, look for requirements and recommendations from the producer. For example, Fusion 360 has a requirements page.

It can be confusion and please note that you never really want to go with a minimum requirement. It will be cheaper and it will work, but it will be frustrating because it will be slow.