Which software would you say is best/easiest for making models and 3D Printing -

3D Printing
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Which software would you say is best/easiest for making models and 3D Printing - (1) Google’s SketchUp (2) autodesk 123D or (3) solidworks ?? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. :slight_smile:

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In my experience:

  1. Sketchup is horrible. It was never designed to be a CAD tool, almost anything complex you make would need repairing.

  2. I tried 123D design, it was slow and buggy, crashed a lot and doesn’t auto-save. Didn’t like it.

  3. Solidworks is top of the line. Very complex, very expensive.

You seemed to have missed a some CAD tools that reside between option 2 and 3, like FreeCAD or Rhino3D.
EDIT - Or blender ! How did I forget Blender.

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FreeCAD and Blender…

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I think that sketchup it’s easy if compared to solidworks ( you miss Autodesk inventor)
But it depends on models that you want to draw. If u are up to mechanical parts both inventor or solidworks are fine. If u want to model shapes maybe blender or rhino are better. Imho

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I love the was of tinkercad, but there is a limit to the complexity you can.achieve

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I do most of the modeling in SketchUp.

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Thank you so much everyone for all your comments! Great help!

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I personally use SolidWorks but if you don’t have access to it there is another program that just became available for free called Design Spark Mechanical I haven’t made any models to be printed from it yet but it does have similar functionality to SolidWorks.

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+1 for @FreeCAD , similar design flow to SolidWorks, but open source and development is coming along astonishingly well.

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Design sparks mechanical is new and looking good

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Solidworks

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Solidworks

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I use solidworks, it’s easier than blender, or any other cad, it’s kinda more human oriented

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I think it depends what you are designing eg if you want it technical and all dimensions exact then solid works is great but not legally free. Blender i find easyrr for free design along with design sparks witch are free. Also blender Seems to be easyer for tracing plans. I am sure most people like the package they get use to. So what i sugest is watch you tube tutorials on each app on the kind of thing you want to do. You will soon fall in loved with at least one of them if not all lol… hope that helps

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Stay away from Sketchup.

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I use 3ds Max,

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I’m all for open source software and FreeCAD is my CAD program of choice. I do not consider Blender to be CAD, neither Sketchup (both are modelers but they do not produce solid models). But I have to admit that FreeCAD is not the easiest to get the hang of, when you have no prior CAD experience.

Sketchup’s ease of use is offset by the fact it’s hard to get a valid STL for complex parts and when you make a lot of edits.

In short, best does not equal easiest, and best is highly subjective.

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Did anyone of you check out Blender’s 3d printer extension?
I would prefer Inventor over Solidworks. At work our engineers are using Solidworks… but it’s pain in the ass to update and stay in contact with our network licensing server. Version 2014 forces our company even to update our server OS… If I could choose, that’s the point to swap to Inventor… which I personally perfer. Intuitive interface (other than ProEngineer ir NX) and there’s not so a big overhead on options. Just what you need.
But as I personally don’t have the money to own one of them I’m now going to have a look into open source. I guess I would luke to combine Photoshop (there are few features which seem to useful for my ideas… and I already have a licence :), Blender and FerrCAD. Blender is more kind of an modeler than a real cad-software. I’m going to use it for sculptures and fantasy-stuff, while I’m going to postproduct it in any cad-software to fit it’s function. I have many stuff to learn abiut those tools, since I have only good ability in Photoshop, Inventor (+hypermill as CAM), ProEngineer and 3D Studio Max.
If I’d have the money, I’d go the easy way: 3D Studio Max combined with Inventor… But student versions are not for commercial use. And u til I’ve earned money, I can’t afford them. When I’ve learned to use the neccessary open source software, I won’t need them any more :wink:
Autodesk better would provide a startup-licence for guys starting their selfemployement…

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@Michael_Weber I’m coming from a situation where I’ve used Blender in the past and just can’t get my head around some of the free cad offerings. Granted it’s Mesh vs CAD with design, but my head works more in the Mesh method. The 3D printing toolbox is handy, however I had one issue when I was designing a precisely measured object and when I ran it got a bunch of errors (from memory, non-faces). The reason being was I was designing it in mm, however when exporting and saving the STL via the toolbox, it doesn’t scale correctly. I have to scale the object up 1000% for it to be the correct measurements. I tried Exporting via the File menu, as it gives you the option to scale at the time of saving, however I got a bunch of ‘Normals’ errors when trying to import the model in to Repetier to print.

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Are there any that have a library of objects already (i.e. spoon /kitchen utensils) that I can tweak?