Hello 3d printing community! I’m a complete newb and I am planning on doing a lot of 3d printing in the coming months.

I wanted to get into 3d printing with the intention of designing a lot of models and printing them for use around the house. So, I wanted to ask what people typically use for designing their own models to print?

Ideally the software would support both Windows and Mac as that’s what I typically use these days. Let me know, thanks!

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    13 hours ago

    Not to be a stereotypically insufferable Stallman style neckbeard about it, but the only two objectively correct answers to this question are FreeCAD for mechanical parametric things, and Blender for organic shapes or decorative models. (You can also bully Blender into doing parametric CAD work with plugins. And I guess OpenSCAD also counts, if you would rather program your models rather than model your models.)

    All of the other available commercial options are some combination of:

    • Proprietary vendor lock-in bullshit
    • Subscription model “software as a service” perpetual money sinks
    • Always online cloud services that either steal your models/make them available to anyone/probably also report you to the Feds
    • Loaded with quasi-legal licensing restrictions that prevent you from distributing or selling your own creations made with it

    Or for extra bonus points, all of the above!

    FreeCAD isn’t exactly slick and it has a rather precipitous learning curve, but it’s also basically the only viable truly free option that won’t spy on you, steal your stuff, or turn you upside down and shake you for money on a monthly basis.

    • rami@ani.socialEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      I agree with everything except relegating Blender to organics and decorative designs. Blender is absolutely viable for hard surface /mechanical modeling. Even without the parametric addons. The Boolean modifiers are much more reliable than they used to be and all the tools for manipulating objects makes the whole design process very fast. Everything I make these days is almost entirely non-destructive, which means edits are painless as well.

      There are of course limitations such as compound fillets being very difficult to execute cleanly if not downright imposible in some cases.

      Have you tried the parametric addons? I can’t imagine they work all that well but I haven’t looked into them in the past 5 or so years.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
      5·
      12 hours ago

      Hey, OpenSCAD is the best! Also Shapelab seems like it might be interesting (sculpt in VR), though I haven’t yet tried it.