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!

Update

First of all, thank you everyone for weighing in here!

Set aside some time last night and played with both Fusion 360 and FreeCAD since those two software kept popping up in the answers. My initial impressions of Fusion 360 was not great. I’m not sure if it’s just the Mac version but the software was a bit laggy and at the end of my session it froze. Otherwise it worked fine and I was able to make a prototype with it and I would have finished it if the program didn’t freeze.

Next I tried FreeCAD. I think the UX is definitely worse than Fusion 360, however I will say it was fast and I did not notice any lag. I admit that my initial impression of it was not good. The second I opened a fresh install of FreeCAD it was already erroring. I watched some tutorials. It definitely suffered from the issue some issues pointed out in the comments where the program has a ton of tutorials but none are really for the latest version so you kind of have to figure out the “modern way” to achieve what the tutorial is telling you to do. It also seems to have some weird bugs. I ran into one where sometimes I had to repeat an action for it to work. No idea why. Otherwise I was able to design a decently complicated prototype in it. I could see myself using it long term for sure.

I saw some programs mentioned where you would basically create models by writing code. If I have time, I will try some of those next. I’m not that into programming though /s.