What 3D software are people using? Is there any particular preferences or favourites?

3D Printing
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@Normand_Chamberland Don’t get me wrong, I dislike sketchup. from what I have heard. sketchup is now supporting stl export natively

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@Camerin_hahn I have yet to try the latest version of Sketchup. I’m running v8 in a Windows virtual machine (and I use it very rarely). But this excerpt from the Sketchup site leads me to believe Sketchup does not support STL natively:

“There aren’t many standards in 3D printing today, but most 3D printers require an STL file to get things rolling. Well, SketchUp happens to speak STL (thanks to an open source plugin)—and a whole bunch of other 3D file formats, too.”

http://www.sketchup.com/3Dfor/3D-printing

I don’t think an open source plugin can be bundled with a commercial software, so users might still need to install this third-party plugin.

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@Normand_Chamberland it really depends on the license that is applied to make it open source. but I may be wrong

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btw, sketchup is easy to make pillars, it is really quite difficult to make spherical object in sketchup… that is why I quit using it. I have found that if I could do it in sketchup, I can do it in openScad, but I have a lot more flexibility, and the STLs are cleaner.