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?
Unfortunately FreeCAD is to professional 3D CAD as wet toilet paper is to kevlar. As someone who’s spent thousands of hours in solidworks, FreeCAD is physically painful to use. Onshape is the “free” compromise that generally works well.
Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.
I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.
Have you tried v1. 0 of freecad? It’s a completely different beast and I’m yet to find anything it can’t do versus fusion 360 (the previous package I used) . We’re actually using it professionally at my job now aswell because of its custom user made work benches and scripting tools which no other package allows.