I am new to 3d printing.

3D Printing
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1

I am new to 3d printing. Got my da vinci 1.0 yesterday in fact! Ive got the xyz slicer software and have had decent success with importing and printing stl files, but I want to start building my own designs. I have some mechanical engineering background with CAD software and CNC equipment. Can anyone recommend a decent, preferably free and simple, program form 3d creation of stl files?

2

You can use Sketchup with this plugin:
http://www.guitar-list.com/download-software/convert-sketchup-skp-files-dxf-or-stl

3

http://www.openscad.org and http://freecadweb.org

4

TinkerCad is easy to use but SketchUp is more powerful and isn’t cloud-based.

5

least us not forget TinkerCAD which is also usually free.

6

If you have mechanical engineering background, you might find Sketchup and Tinkercad limited. If you’re on Windows or Mac, Autodesk has some free offerings. There’s also DesignSpark Mechanical. If you prefer to go the open source way, I would say give FreeCAD a shot.

7

Freecad looks familiar. Thanks for the great suggestions. Im going to give this thing a go.

8

Find a CAD program that is comfortable to use. I had difficulty getting the hang of Autodesk’s 123D Design and decided to work in TinkerCAD until I had the patience for 123D. I need to practice with it more as I am used to more traditional CAD based drawing programs like AutoCAD than TinkerCAD. But that being said I had an easier time figuring out how to use TinkerCAD than 123D. Go figure. My design is coming out really well and I hope to have it ready to print in the near future. Then all I need is a 3D printer. Lol

9

Freecad is about the best free one I can think of. For the odd mesh files you might need to edit Blender is awesome for that. Personally I use ViaCad Pro, they also have a cheaper version for like 100 bucks thats very capable called ViaCad 2d/3d. Like you I worked around profesional software when I ran CNC, and I found the free stuff drove me nuts. They were missing those odd CAD Tools I was always used to using.

10

I used to design fishing lures in Blender and cut them. If ultra precision isn’t an issue it works great and has a ton of features. http://www.blender.org