But to be fair, from personal experience with both, Blender will take much more time to reach a basic level, compared to AD Fusion 360.
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But to be fair, from personal experience with both, Blender will take much more time to reach a basic level, compared to AD Fusion 360.
+1 For Fusion360. It's mind blowing that a program with so much power is free for makers/enthusiast.
I recommend Blender which is free..
I hear Fusion360 is good but still in a different class than professional CAD systems.
Given it has a 90-day free trial period and not prohibitively high price, I recommend Rhinoceros if you want to get involved in serious 3d modeling. There is a free plugin, grasshopper, which lets you perform amazing math-driven operations on 3d models.
Has anyone here ever tried Spaceclaim ?
Only ever seen them at the tct show, it always looks good and I stand there and pretend I know what they're talking about :-)
But never heard of anyone not at the show actually using it.
I use SpaceClaim and it's awesome. Doesn't come cheap though like most higher end packages.
Blender is pretty lackluster for dimensional work.
Sketchup is wonderful if you have no idea what you are doing, but you have to make sure your geometry is proper. I have years of practice with the software, but it only takes minutes to get the basics down.
If we are going down the road of proproetry software and Rhino being mentioned then I think Moi3D needs to be thrown into the mix. Code is written by the same guy that wrote Rhino so there is a lot of overlap, it is very simple to use and costs only $295. I bought it and use it a lot, particularly when working with surfaces.
But does anyone who's not a commercial cad designer actually NEED commercial cad software, when there's so much around that's free ?
I'd say not.
Guess it really depends on what you're after. I work a lot with STL's, scan data and reverse engineering in a "CAD" environment. Free tools just can't pull that off.