I’m using Fusion360, and I dislike it for a lot of reasons, but it’s easy to use. I tried FreeCAD, but it was very janky in comparison. Shapr3D was surprisingly good, but there’s no way I’m paying monthly for my hobby usage. I need precision prints, so I can’t just use Blender or similar.
Is there some magical unicorn software I’m not finding?
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OpenSCAD. Nothing for the faint of heart, you need to know what you are doing, but it is perfect for programmers like me.
90% fusion
9% tinkercad
1% dicking around in OnShape, getting frustrated, and giving up
I absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it
I was learning with freecad.
Tried to defeature the screw holes on Steam Controller model and it crashed the application :/
I’m still learning so I have no idea how to do that manually :<
Blender for most things, freecad sometimes
FreeCAD, and I recommend you give it a second try, while watching the excellent tutorials from Deltahedra and Mangojelly on YouTube. Lots of the jank can be avoided if you only know how, so the tutorials are extremely useful.
FreeCAD has gotten exponentially better with each release the last few years, and both active developers and funding/donations from users have increased exponentially. The future is bright. And unlike the “free” commercial programs, FreeCAD is immune to future rug-pulls and enshitification.
You might also want to try https://dune3d.org/ , a relatively new 3D CAD software
What sort of precision are you not getting from blender?
Once you set the parameters (I set mine to mm), I have found it to be accurate enough to make additional tools with which to measure.
Mind you, I don’t need accuracy down past a mm.
I like using Blender too. Granted, I’m already somewhat familiar with it for art purposes. But just for STLs, if you know what you’re doing you can actually get away with quite a bit using a boolean CAD-like workflow!
OpenScad because I do simple things like funnels or part bins.
I bounced pretty hard off Free ad and ended up using OnShape. I don’t feel great about it though.
SolidWorks
FreeCAD, but basically because it was free and open source when I started learning (which wasn’t long ago anyways)
Plasticity. It’s the best balance I’ve found between cost and usability. And it doesn’t force you to save your files on someone’s cloud.
You pay annually and get updates but when your year is up you can choose to pay less for each subsequent year or stop paying and continue using the version you currently have indefinitely without future updates.
I did the Plasticity demo, but I got busy and forgot about it. Now I can’t do another demo.
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Everyone is wrong. OpenSCAD is so much better than anything else. It’s so much easier to just write code. I regret wasting so much time learning Fusion.
I also don’t have a good solution and I’m extremely slowly writing my own stuff starting from svg and drawings and some programming to do geometry. But I mostly haven’t touched 3d yet.
I would use blender which you have already excluded so no idea.
Well, CAD and “3D” are not the same thing. Blender is good for 3d, but cad features are stapled on. Also blender has too many knobs—that is not useful for CAD
FreeCAD. It’s janky, absolutely, but it’s quite powerful once you get used to it. Improved a lot with the latest major update as well.
I also tried OpenSCAD for a bit. As someone with a programming background, I really like the principle of how it works. But ultimately, I found it way too limiting.
I used OpenSCAD for a bit, and it’s good for simple things where clicking is far less efficient. I once needed a plate with a set of holes. OpenSCAD was great.
I’m still learning FreeCAD, but so far is seems just fine to me! Just different from what I am used to. But there are a few good channels on YouTube that do good tutorials
What are you used to?
