Just want to thank everyone that engaged with my post today everyone was so chill and inspiring. I want to encourage us all in this community and all over Lemmy to continue to be kind and helpful. I had so many bad experiences on Reddit with hate keepers and know it alls and I’m glad we got this opportunity to be something better.
Ps: what cad software did you start on and what do you use now? Any tips and tricks will be greatly appreciated!
I have only created a few simple stls in Tinkercad. Real basic stuff. Anyone have thoughts on Sketchup?
I like SketchUp for my woodworking stuff and wanted it to work with 3D but the shortcomings at the time weren’t worth it. The product could have changed so this could be dated.
Always seemed to fight getting models watertight which has been no issue with tinker, fusion, openscad, or freecad. Also, it was hard with curved objects. Lastly, it didn’t have parametric support which is a must for design once/use many things. As an example, I have a simple funnel with a lip to fit into bottles or whatever. Need one for a different container? Just a couple of adjustments and I’m printing.
Not saying not to use it but others have listed many alternatives for 3D that are superior. SketchUp seems to have a good community for questions it’s just that other tools have better (IMO.)
Thanks for the insights. Still new to drafting my own designs. I will probably stick with Tinkercad awhile longer and the move to an open source program from there.
Only advice I can give, not knowing your learning style, is whatever CAD platform you choose will seem challenging until you “get” the mindset it uses. Not really hard, but all have an approach which will become natural after some time. Take something you did in Tinkercad in 10 minutes and recreate it in say freeCAD, initially it’ll seem like something so easy shouldn’t be this hard….in short order it’ll be a breeze.