Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by cosmicrookie@lemmy.world to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world

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I visited a friend who is a professional medical engineer, and watched him work on a 3D design on some software paid for my the university they worked at. The options and features looked very practical!

Although I am not even close to working on so complicated projects, I did love the funtionalities. So now i have decided to put in the effort and learn a decent program, instead of using Tinkercad. I have been very happy with Tinkercad, but some things are only doable with workarounds or very creative methods.

The question is, what software should i start learning?

-FreeCAD
-Fusion 360
-AutoCAD
-Sketchup
-Blender
-LibreCAD
-Something else entirely?

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[-] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 month ago

As someone who has to interface professionally with solidworks and everyone at my company on the mechanical side uses solidworks, it is also slow as fuck when the part or assembly gets a bit complicated. Just opening it takes a few minutes. If we have to open solidworks and an assembly from scratch during a meeting, that is 10 minutes gone.

Definitely has 10x as many QoL and productvity features and much better TNP solutions and heuristics built over decades, plus very useful plugins, but speed and stability are not its strong points 😂

[-] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah I recently started switching from SolidWorks to Creo in a professional setting, it is amazing how slow and clunky SolidWorks feels in comparison. The downside is that Creo doesn't hold your hand at all so you better know what you are doing.

Coming from that side, I have a hard time with the free/inexpensive options available for makers, they just don't work nearly as well.

this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025

20 points (95.5% liked)

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