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!

    • idunnololz@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Looks like there is a consensus with FreeCAD so I will give that a try later today. Thank you!

  • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    Another consideration… If you are a programmer type then OpenSCAD is a language-based program. I’ve been using it heavily for the past week designing a dual-filament extruder for my Ender 3, and last year I designed and built a utility trailer. As with anything it has its quirks, but I’m much more comfortable writing code and I always found the other GUI-oriented programs to be unintuitive.

  • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    That depends entirely on what you want to print/design.

    If it’s organic forms (Think characters, decorative objects, etc) then something like Blender would suit your need.

    if you want to go more technical (machines, precision parts) then you’d use one of the various CAD tools, e.g. FreeCAD, TinkerCad or Fusion360

  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I’ve been generally happy with FreeCAD for my use. If I am doing something less parametric and more organic in shape, I will use Blender.

  • flynnguy@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I’ve been down this rabbit hole and have some thoughts. Personally I’ve been trying to stick to Linux which makes things harder but since you have Mac and/or Windows, you have more options.

    First, my main app I use (and why my laptop is still dual boot) is Fusion 360. I have a hobbyist license so it’s free with some limitation that don’t really matter. It doesn’t work great on linux (I’ve gotten it to run with WINE but it seems to crash and not run great) so I’ve been looking at alternatives. However, it works great and will do pretty much whatever you want. Also works well with CNC if you want to branch out into that.

    Lately I’ve started looking at https://www.onshape.com/en/ as it’s all browser based. The free version means nothing is private but because it’s browser based, it works with Linux. I’ve just played around with it once but it looks promising.

    I really want to like FreeCAD but it’s been confusing to me when I’ve tried to use it in the past. I think I just need to sit down and watch a view videos and read the docs to learn it. I’ve heard good things about it after it hit 1.0 so maybe I need to revisit it. I feel like this will be best to learn long term.

    https://openscad.org/ isn’t your standard CAD program but it can be really powerful. I’ve used it a few times but you need to think of your models programmatically and I’ve found this to be difficult for some applications. It’s really cool though and worth checking out.

    I’ve found TinkerCAD to be ok for simple things but it seems a bit simplistic for the things I’ve been trying to do.