Macintosh-based CAD

[pfontaine2]

First, I'm brand new here. I work for a company whose art department is Mac based. We are looking to bring our CAD work in-house (we've been doing traditional mechanicals in Adobe Illustrator and our vendors in China have been creating CAD files for manufacture as needed). We also want to start early prototyping with a 3D printer which we've haven't purchased yet but will be purchased soon once our new budget is set.

For CAD, we've been looking at SolidWorks and AutoCAD but these are both PC-based. I know we can set up a Mac to be dual booting into Windows but I was hoping to find a Mac-based solution. Any ideas?

Thanks ahead of time!
Pierre

[CarterTG]

McNeel's Rhino 3D has recently expanded into OSX territory. Here's an intro webinar that gives a sense of it in use:



The vast majority of CAD jewelers are using Rhino because it offers a tremendous set of tools to create/describe surfaces. The intricate ways that jewelry is designed should give a clue as to Rhino's suitability as a modeling program. In this thread, I used a pre-release version of Rhino OSX to model a brain just to see how far it can be pushed for organic objects:

http://discourse.mcneel.com/t/anybod...th-rhino/10981

An added bonus is that Rhino ingests and outputs to numerous other formats. All the nURBS objects I've created in Rhino have always exported cleanly to STL (for 3D printing) without issues. (Watertight, no naked edges, etc)

If the products you work with are more stodgy and mechanical, the alternative is to pay Autodesk their ongoing subscription fee and use a product like Fusion360 for OSX.

[3dex ltd]

FreeCAD and Blender 3D both work on Mac

[pfontaine2]

Great suggestions! Thank you very much for your help. I'll certainly check out all three mentioned so far.
Pierre

[Sebastian Finke]

Short answer: no there is no MCAD available for Mac natively. Rhino doesn't because a) it is not as developed and fleshed out as the PC version and b) it isn't parametric (seeing as how you were considering Solidworks).

Mac seem to be more popular with the graphic design/artsy crowd. For MCAD you will need to use Windows or (if you have the cash) Linux.

[pfontaine2]

Sebastian's response makes me want to flesh out my earlier question.

I work for a party goods company that produces everything from paper goods (banners, signs, centerpieces) right through plastic cups and plastic dinnerware. We also make Halloween costumes. Right now, we create our mechanicals using Adobe Illustrator which are drawn out with measurements and sent to our vendors who are mostly in China though some are here domestically. These vendors either sculpt the designs by hand and make traditional molds or use CAD to create the files needed for production.

We've been contemplating the creation of the CAD files in-house and sending them to the manufacturer to be made. This way there would be no misunderstanding through the interpretation of our mechanical drawings. We aren't producing anything more complex than a plastic fork or spoon or plastic cup. Perhaps at the most complex, we might be creating a plastic mask for a Halloween character.

I'm not well versed in CAD though I have used many 3D programs like Blender to create illustrations for our catalog before we can get a sample made from China. In the process of searching for a CAD solution, SolidWorks has been suggested repeatedly.

Is there a Mac-based solution that does what I've described? Do we really need to go PC and get Solidworks or would Rhino3D get the job done just as well? I readily admit my ignorance on the subject and am reaching out to get information. Any continued feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,
Pierre

[Sebastian Finke]

A fork is far more complicated to design than you might think, spoons even more so. I know as I have designed 3 different sets of cutlery for the fast food industry. For this sort of work Rhino should do nicely. However it is not parametric and surface knits need to be closely monitored to avoid naked edges. And, as I mentioned, the Mac version is not as fleshed out as the PC version. Quite buggy too, I've been told.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with non-parametric software.

[pfontaine2]

Can you fill me in on what the advantage of parametric is? Again, I willingly admit I'm a newbie at this. I'm not necessarily making the purchasing decision but am part of a team. I've been asked only because I've done 3D work before. I know that CAD and a program like Blender are two totally different things but people at work think "if it's 3D, go ask Pierre". I have a good understanding of the kinds of tools I'm going to find in various CAD applications but clearly I'm not as well educated about these things as I should be.
Thanks again,
Pierre

[Sebastian Finke]

Parametric CAD allows the user to control all variables across an array of documents. The list is pretty exhaustive but as an example your part, assembly and drawing files are all linked. Make a change in one and the others update automatically. Collision checking in an assembly will alert to part overlap, if it should occur. Each workspace has a design tree that allows you to rollback your design to make changes. Along with that you can add material qualities such as density and (in more sophisticated softwares even young's modulus and poisson's ratio). That's the basics. Rhino can't do any of that.

[pfontaine2]

Thank you Sebastian. The information you've provided is very informative and I can now totally understand how this feature can affect the design process. We'll certainly take this into consideration as we move forward.