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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I liked TinkerCAD.
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.
Blender has addons for parametric workflows. Actually, there’s plugins to do anything you want.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
I second this. It was my step after tinkercad and never looked back. But I do love programming so maybe biased.
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 haven’t used it but there is also tinkercad
I’ve been using progeCAD for the last few years and its basically a clone of AutoCAD for a fraction of the price and you own it unlike autodesk’s model they’ve had since like 2017 or something.
I saw a bit ago that blended has an addon or plugin or something that adds parametric functions
I think I got the impression it’s less powerful that proper parametric cad or something, but I figured I’d mention it in case that makes it a more viable option for you!
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.
I use a free version of sketchup make from 2008. You can still find it out there on the internet for download.
The last free-to-run version of Sketchup is from 2017, and ironically you can download it from the official website, you just have to dig for it. It isn’t immediately available, and they try their best to sell you the latest version.
