this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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3DPrinting

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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?

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[–] JustEnoughDucks 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

As someone who has to interface professionally with solidworks and everyone at my company on the mechanical side uses solidworks, it is also slow as fuck when the part or assembly gets a bit complicated. Just opening it takes a few minutes. If we have to open solidworks and an assembly from scratch during a meeting, that is 10 minutes gone.

Definitely has 10x as many QoL and productvity features and much better TNP solutions and heuristics built over decades, plus very useful plugins, but speed and stability are not its strong points 😂

[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago

Yeah I recently started switching from SolidWorks to Creo in a professional setting, it is amazing how slow and clunky SolidWorks feels in comparison. The downside is that Creo doesn't hold your hand at all so you better know what you are doing.

Coming from that side, I have a hard time with the free/inexpensive options available for makers, they just don't work nearly as well.

[–] Maalus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Depends on what stability you are talking about. For freecad, I have to redo the entire part every time I change a dimension and the program doesn't like it. Which is my main gripe with it - parametric cad that doesn't like its parameters changed. It was worse before the naming problem was solved, but is still a huge issue. With solidworks and the same designs, we didn't get as much lag (though it is a huge resource hog), but changing stuff earlier was a breeze and always worked