this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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3DPrinting

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I visited a friend who is a professional medical engineer, and watched him work on a 3D design on some software paid for my the university they worked at. The options and features looked very practical!

Although I am not even close to working on so complicated projects, I did love the funtionalities. So now i have decided to put in the effort and learn a decent program, instead of using Tinkercad. I have been very happy with Tinkercad, but some things are only doable with workarounds or very creative methods.

The question is, what software should i start learning?

-FreeCAD
-Fusion 360
-AutoCAD
-Sketchup
-Blender
-LibreCAD
-Something else entirely?

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[–] daannii@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

I found fusion360 and blender to be best for me. Fusion made by same company as tinkercad.

I tried freeCAD and had constant errors (like 20 at a time) and couldn't figure out what was going on even tried googling. And that's when I learned that's just how it goes with that program.

I like blender to make sculpted models. Tutorials and figuring things out myself was frustrating but now I have a decent grasp on the basics and I find it much easier to use and keep learning new things all the time with it.

I've only used fusion for a few projects that required it and had to rely a lot on tutorial videos but I was able to do the modeling. I plan to learn more of it in the future but it's pretty decent so far.

I've not used any of the others you have listed.