TLDR = what’s a good next step after kid-friendly 3d creation tools?
Solved = Fusion360 is voted as winner, we even got a nice tutorial playlist.

Hi all - I’m still very much a new user. Highly skilled in IT but just getting my feet wet in 3D printing, since a month or so. I love the possibilities! I can physically create anything I can image, it’s amazing.

So far, I’ve used mostly TinkerCad and done lots with it. The learning curve is practically non-existent, and it has sufficient features to do a lot.

But of course it’s not perfect. Obvious example: can’t do fillets, except in roundabout ways using negative blocks.

I’ve tried OnShape, OpenScad, Fusion 360, but found them quite a steep hill to climb.

Are these good choices, or is there something in-between that would make it easier for me to advance?

  • @[email protected]
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    811 months ago

    Fusion360 is great.

    The two things I dislike about it though is the lack of linux support and the fact that you have to store your projects in their cloud. Personally I would prefer local only projects which I can easily include in a git repository without having to manually export my model every time I make a change to it.

    So far FreeCad seems like the best option for me in regards to those points but it is definitely less intuitive than Fusion360

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      I only use freecad and it sucks. But it’s not infested with corporate bullshit like cloud saves, so it’s automatically better than fusion 360.

    • Nanomerce
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      311 months ago

      doesn’t have Linux support, but Solid Edge community let’s you save locally.

    • @PlutoniumAcidOP
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      211 months ago

      in the cloud

      From what I read, the free tier only allows to save 10 models, total, ever, then I’d need a paid version. Is that accurate?

      • @bigredgiraffe
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        11 months ago

        No you can only have 10 read/write models at the same time but as far as I found you can store as many read-only models as you want and you can toggle them back and forth. Also, you also can store the files locally, or at least export them to a local fusion file.