I’m looking into 3d design software for designing and printing robot sumo parts. I’m new to 3d design and there seems to be a huge selection of 3d design software to choose from, a lot of it free too. I’m looking for something intuitive, with not too steep a learning curve that is free and available on the Mac. Any recommendations would be welcome.
I use both FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. Different approaches to 3D Design (visual vs. programmatic) but it is well worth being able to use both.
One of the benefits of OpenSCAD is there is very little to learn, all you need is to know how to create the handful of primitives, and get to grips with how to combine and difference them. The skill is in getting good at it.
Another benefit of OpenSCAD is that you can modularise each element of your robot and re-use, so for example you could design a servo as a module and then subtract or difference it from your parts.
The following video might help you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmKnvEcPTk8
I am sure many would feel uncomfortable with the coding approach, but it certainly works for me.
I’m new to it as well and I recently tried lots of packages, at least 10. In the end I found many of the online ones in browsers were the easiest but they were limited in what they could do. For an actual app Google Sketchup was by far the simplest. I did use Blender for a while which is significantly more powerful but I found I kept having problems so I went back to Sketchup.
Here is a pretty good stuff
http://www.designspark.com/eng/page/mechanical
Moment of Inspiration 3d (http://moi3d.com) Edit: oops, it’s not free (although it’s relatively low cost as far as this type of software goes). For Free and ultra-shallow learning curve, I love Sketchup.
sketchup is pretty easy to learn, for a lot of people, and there are a lot of existing models for you to use and modify. I prefer freecad, myself, because there are a lot of good ways to do things, so you can choose a method/flow you prefer.
Thanks all. I had a quick look at Blender and SketchUp yesterday, plus a fiddle around with OpenSCAD earlier this morning, and another program available via the Mac app store that had terrible reviews (can’t recall the name). I think I might make a start with OpenSCAD as I quite like the programmatic approach, though I’ll take look at FreeCAD over the next few days too.
If you can even stand the programmatic approach, go with openscad. That’s the only reason I’ve ever read anyone disliking it.
As a middle school teacher, I have used tinkercad, and 123D both free or free versions, now owned by the creators of auto cad. I like 123D because it has more adjusting tools, but I really like Tinkercad because it is so easy to use.