I am not an engineer. I’m not even good at math, and my spatial reasoning skills are nonexistent. With that in mind, here are the CAD programs I’ve tried.
Blender, Pros: Free, surprisingly comprehensive. Cons: Not parametric, can’t precisely measure or constrain models, all the extra stuff you get like rendering has no use in 3D printing.
Onshape: Pros: Easy to use, convenient (I’ve successfully edited a model on my phone), free*. Cons: Runs on someone else’s computer in the cloud, not private, enshittification is sure to come shortly if history is any indication.
Fusion360: Pros: seems to be what everyone else is using. Cons: enshittification is already happening, runs locally with limited saves in the cloud so you don’t own your files but also don’t get the run anywhere convenience of the cloud.
Plasticity: Pros: buttery smooth workflow, pay once run forever, runs and saves locally. Cons: Not peremetric so hard to go back and adjust things later.
FreeCAD: Pros: free, open source. Cons: workflow as rough as sandpaper, constantly crashes.
Plasticity and Onshape have proven to be the most productive choices for me. If only Plasticity were parametric it would be the perfect software for me personally.
I want to like FreeCAD, I really do, but it’s so hard to use. I love Plasticity, but it’s meant for making 3D assets for games etc. using hard surface modelling, not so much for manufacturing.
If I may digress for a moment, I work as a network admin. I’m familiar mostly with Cisco at work, but use Ubiquiti at home. Cisco equipment is monstrously expensive from a consumer or prosumer perspective, and the only way to get true hands-on experience is to buy used equipment from ebay which may still be pricey.
Ubiquiti’s market strategy seems to be to make the kind of gear that a network admin would want in their home. It’s inexpensive relative to the big fish like Cisco, but has a fairly comprehensive feature set. The idea is to entice Joe IT guy to buy Ubiquiti gear for his house, fall in love with it, then push for the company to switch to Ubiquiti the next time they upgrade.
What I want is the Ubiquiti of CAD programs. Easy to use, low barrier to entry but comprehensive enough to use professionally.
Suggestions/comments?
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Try freecad as a flatpak maybe ? Doesn’t crash for me unless I do something stupid with fillets. It’s harder, tougher to use than paid options but you own what you make at the end.
You can save files in fusion 360 locally. It’s just not the main way the program encourages which sucks.
I think you have to like export instead pf save but you do get a .f3d file which is the same as what gets saved to the cloud.
Onshape would be ubiquity. Easy to use, flash, has all the good bits, ripe to screw the customer at any moment once enough lock in is gained.
I liked TinkerCAD.
Blender has addons for parametric workflows. Actually, there’s plugins to do anything you want.
I would also highly recommend Destructive Extrude for Blender, a plugin that enables the push-pull modeling that made SketchUp an entry level CAD learner’s dream (before Google sold it to Trimble who promptly ate it and shat it back out)
My solution to the same issue was OpenSCAD. But it might not be for the faint of heart. For me, this is a godsend, working 100% in my mindspace.
If they so said have no math or spatial reasoning then OpenSCAD is the last tool for them to try.
Maybe I suck at CAD but love OpenScad as its easier for me to understand.
As I said, it’s right for me, but it might not be for everyone. If I was to invent a CAD system, I’d write something exactly like OpenSCAD…
I tried using FreeCAD 5 or 10 years ago, and it was painful. I had access to Inventor, so I used that for the limited work I was doing. Later, I heard of some build/pack/whatever that removed a lot of pain from the FreeCAD workflow, but I can’t remember what it was called and I wasn’t doing CAD work any more. Trying to find that led me to this, though:
Also, I found a video on YouTube that appears to go through the same steps. Here it is.
I’m not sure it that will solve your problems, but the 20 minute video should answer that question for you.
Freecad 1.0 released not so long ago, you should take a look and be amazed
Just watching that video I linked gave a lot more Inventor vibes than I recall from the last time I looked at it. Last time it still felt like trying to shoehorn a 3D modeler into AutoCAD.
The Ondsel project seems to have died. Their apparent business model was they were going to bolt cloud shit around FreeCAD. Hilariously stupid business model but at least some of the money they wasted went to open source software. They shook out a few of the open source tumors, like the sketcher now has a semi-intelligent dimension tool, I think they tackled the topological naming problem and we’ve finally got an official Assembly workbench that even sort of works I guess. But it’s still FreeCAD and if something can be unintuitive, it will.
Yeah, it explicitly states Ondsel is EOL in the article, as well as the theme they used (maybe?), which is in the video. The repack or whatever I heard about years ago, specifically mentioned in the description that it retooled non-standard workflow in FreeCAD. I keep thinking Tommy’s pack or something like that was the name, but it’s 5 minutes of my life from years ago when this field was just starting to be less important to me. 🤷♂️
I will be blunt. If you are as bad at math and spatial reasoning as you say, then CAD probably isn’t for you. You will always find it difficult and unrewarding. Design and engineering require a mindset you might not have.
As far as “cheap and easy and professional” CAD they ALL require effort to learn and money to gain entry for commercial versions. CAD is a skill and skills require effort to acquire. And it sounds as if you have no desire to put in very much effort.
For a CAD program to meet your want of cheap and simple, (professional means a lot of money and takes more than a few minutes of effort), look at TinkerCAD. It’s free and simple enough that I teach that to 5th and 6th grade students well enough for them to make simple objects. Ain’t nothing wrong with starting there and learning how to think about design and CAD before you might try and step into more demanding software.
Woof.
Hey, horses don’t say woof.
RS Design Spark?
I haven’t used it in a few years but I remember it being alright for hobby stuff.
Solidworks has a cheap maker version. You can save locally. It’s always been shit, so it can’t get enshittified /s.
I use alibre, it’s a one time purchase
I got a 3d printer about a year ago and looked into CAD software and came to the exact same conclusion you just did. I ended up using Plasticity. I thiink I paid $150 for a year of updates. But there are still two major drawbacks: first is it’s not parametric, as you said, but more importantly you can’t import stls and edit them. You can export stls, but you have to make them from scratch. You can technically import an stl but it’s impossible to edit. Oftentimes I find a design online but I want to tweak it to my purposes but I can’t do that.
I’d love it if Free CAD had a better UI. It’s just so frustrating and hideous to use.
I’ve been using freecad with great success for years now and I’d say while I agree freecad is rough in terms of ux, it is highly usable, especially after 1.0 version. I feel like investing time in overcoming its flaws and weaknesses will pay off in the future, as it will enable access to a stable, eternally free and reliable software. Though I also agree it crashes frequently, I set a very frequent auto save and I don’t often get screwed now.
FreeCAD is a spectacular second CAD tool to learn. Once you understand the concepts and workflows for one of the industry standard tools, you will know how to translate that to FreeCAD speak as it were.
As a first CAD tool it is atrocious. It crashes while you are exploring new tools and you just don’t have the vocabulary (or muscle memory) to actually ask questions or search for answers.
If someone really wants to get into hobbyist CAD (for 3d printing), probably the best flow is to start with TinkerCAD, switch to Fusion 360 (assuming you aren’t running linux. Onshape if you are), and once you are comfortable and can build basically whatever you want change to FreeCAD if you want more control over your toolchain.
And if someone wants to do this professionally? Fusion 360 is the endstate. Maybe you’ll end up at a firm that uses the other family (which I think Onshape is part of?) but you will basically never find a company that wants FreeCAD formats.
FreeCad was crashing on average every two minutes when I tried using it last month. I really want to like it but crashes need to be toned down…
No issues with Freecad here and I am on linux + Nvidia!
Are you sure that your system is up to date? are drivers ok?
Install the stable versions not the developer versions. Freecad is seriously good. I’m using both freecad and NX on a project. NX for drawings because freecad still chokes on drawings. But its getting better for drawings. We’ll be fully jumping to freecad soon.
I’ve been using it for months now and I had zero crashes. Is this a platform thing or just because I’m mostly only using the parts menu?
Yeah I have used Freecad for ages and never had an issue, also use an NVidia GPU. Hopefully you get your issue sorted, because freecad really is good and only getting better every time.
Well, it definitely isn’t suppose to be THAT bad. I can get a crash every half an hour or even longer. Usually for no apparent reason - like when I want to sketch on a face and the app switches from PartDesign workbench to sketcher or wise versa. And then after restart that doesn’t happen again. That is annoying, has been happening for ages and would really like it to be fixed. But it’s not every few minutes, more like half an hour to an hour.
I have had FreeCAD crash apparently because of something I did. Like it couldn’t handle some operation and couldn’t fail gracefully.
Maybe use a release and not a weekly build?
Pirated inventor is good. Fully local, used by lots of people. Free when obtained on the high seas
There’s an entry missing in your list, which many people seem to not know about: Siemens Solid Edge
Like fusion, is free for personal/hobby use. But it’s not “cloud based”. Also unlike fusion, they aren’t constantly scaling back what you can do with the free edition. Probably worth a shot.
