Just want to thank everyone that engaged with my post today everyone was so chill and inspiring. I want to encourage us all in this community and all over Lemmy to continue to be kind and helpful. I had so many bad experiences on Reddit with hate keepers and know it alls and I’m glad we got this opportunity to be something better.
Ps: what cad software did you start on and what do you use now? Any tips and tricks will be greatly appreciated!
Totally agree with Bishma on Tinkercad, it has limits but you’ll be building stuff. I came from SketchUp which isn’t strong for 3D printing, played with Blender for a short bit then sucked it up and dove into Fusion.
I started watching videos from Paul McWhorter on YouTube who walks through things slowly instead of some of the other guys who go at a lightening fast pace, not saying they aren’t good but too many what just happened there moments. Paul’s videos are slightly dated but still strong for basics.
Fusion 360 or die learning…
This drives me nuts on a lot of “tutorials”. Not just for CAD but for anything on YouTube. The presenter will launch into a massive word vomit, jumping from step to step, with barely a breath in between. They’ll have half the thing done and I’m still trying to figure out which side of my mouse I’m supposed to grab. And FSM help me if the idiot behind the camera opens a copy of notepad and starts typing instructions instead of speaking…
There’s a ton of content out there for everything but a huge difference between being a teacher vs being an expert. People think it’s easy, just make a video of me doing something, but instruction is much more than that.
I have only created a few simple stls in Tinkercad. Real basic stuff. Anyone have thoughts on Sketchup?
I like SketchUp for my woodworking stuff and wanted it to work with 3D but the shortcomings at the time weren’t worth it. The product could have changed so this could be dated.
Always seemed to fight getting models watertight which has been no issue with tinker, fusion, openscad, or freecad. Also, it was hard with curved objects. Lastly, it didn’t have parametric support which is a must for design once/use many things. As an example, I have a simple funnel with a lip to fit into bottles or whatever. Need one for a different container? Just a couple of adjustments and I’m printing.
Not saying not to use it but others have listed many alternatives for 3D that are superior. SketchUp seems to have a good community for questions it’s just that other tools have better (IMO.)
Thanks for the insights. Still new to drafting my own designs. I will probably stick with Tinkercad awhile longer and the move to an open source program from there.
Only advice I can give, not knowing your learning style, is whatever CAD platform you choose will seem challenging until you “get” the mindset it uses. Not really hard, but all have an approach which will become natural after some time. Take something you did in Tinkercad in 10 minutes and recreate it in say freeCAD, initially it’ll seem like something so easy shouldn’t be this hard….in short order it’ll be a breeze.