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?

  • cosmicrookie@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    Thanks for the tips!
    Can you explain examples of what FreeCAD is lacking at, compared to the pro software? I am not sure what I am going into, but would hate to limit myself or waste time/money just by making the wrong choice at this point

    • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      There are two sides of issues with FreeCAD: On one side it has usability issues. The comes largely from the “workbench” concept, so often you will be missing a tool unless you change workbenches which in terms leads to another tool missing. Furthermore the UI is not really consistent in how things are named, how things are done,etc. Same goes for the actual step of editing things. So while you eventually “get there”, especially as a newcomer, it will take time and a bit of try and error. Parametric solutions are also very clunky and often not as feature rich. (Which is a pain if using it for woodworking) Another thing that is the whole “derivate” thing most professional CAD solutions offer - e.g. build plans, CAM, BOM, simulation,etc. You can do them with FreeCAD, but it takes some plugins and is nearly as good or comfortable as the professional solutions.

      The other side is performance and stability. FreeCAD is a nightmare when it comes to importing thing with a lot facets or large files, is unstable as fuck when working with large assemblies and generally is slower compared to other solutions. (Even the otherwise not very fast Solidworks is faster)

      In the end I would recommend you to try all three of them (and a few others from the list) and then decide if you can be bothered to use FreeCAD or find another solution worth it more. (Personally I would avoid Fusion,btw. due to the fact that it gets more enshitified daily)