New Guy looking for 3D design software recommendations

[Hugues]

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.

[ServiceXp]

+1 For Fusion360. It's mind blowing that a program with so much power is free for makers/enthusiast.

[simpo]

I recommend Blender which is free..

[ralphzoontjens]

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.

[curious aardvark]

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.

[dklassen]

I use SpaceClaim and it's awesome. Doesn't come cheap though like most higher end packages.

[Ama-fessional Molder]

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.

[Sebastian Finke]

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.

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.

[curious aardvark]

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.

[dklassen]

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.