Do i have to learn CAD

[old man emu]

ome, if your already using rhino then you will be taking about 100 steps backward going to 123d design.

That would put me back to the neo-natal unit because I can barely crawl with Rhino now.

OME

[jimc]

Haha, well those free or beginner type cad packages i find are harder because they just lack the tools so everytime you want to do something more than make a box your screwed or have to get creative with it to make it work. With rhino you have every tool imaginable. Sent you a pm

[Chayat]

I Love Wings3d. I find the interface so intuitive that it does not get in the way of a creative process.

[awerby]

If you're just using it for 3D printing, take a look at Cubify Design (was Alibre). It has a lot of the same features as Solidworks, like parametric solids modeling with a history tree and output as 2D drawings, but it costs a lot less. The only 3D format that the $199 version exports is STL, but that's all you need for 3D printing.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[mechadense]

If you want to design technical stuff and are ok with programming then OpenSCAD is a good choice.
http://www.openscad.org/
There is also implicitcad but it lacks a good quick preview yet.
http://www.implicitcad.org/

I've written a minimal language for the sage CAS system: miniSageCAD
It's quite slow but can generate cool stuff:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:40210

[evanfinkle]

If you want to avoid 3d modelling entirely then maybe check out 123D catch, just to reproduce found objects. http://www.123dapp.com/catch