3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: [email protected] or [email protected]
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Try to run something like fusion360 or freecad to see if your device can handle those, they will come in handy once you're ready for them.
I just use Blender. Any advantage to using FreeCAD?
Blender is more of an artistic tool. Not great at creating precise geometry. Tools like freecad make it much easier to create functional parts where the geometry matters. They are also easier to edit and adjust things after the fact as they tend to be parameterized - letting you update a value to update the model.
But they are terrible at more artistic things like miniatures or figurines or more organic shapes which is where blender shines.
So it really depends on what you are trying to create. But for a lot of people using 3d printers (which I believe tend to create more functional than atheistic prints - at least from designs they have created themselves) tools like freecad tend to serve them better then tools like blender.
Blender can absolutely be great at creating precise geometry, one just needs to know how to properly use the tool. Yes, the workflow will be much different than in other CAD, but principally, Blender is just as good as any other, or even better due to a more extensive development history and greater degree of maturity.
It has its strength. The downside to blender is it’s geometry based unlike Fusion and others that are parametric.
Where this shines, for example, is when you’re defining a circle with a given radius. If it’s 4mm in a cad program and you export to STL it will be polygon based. But you can adjust the density of the export and, if you need to, scale your cad up 200%, 300%, etc and export again. Always resulting in the closest approximation of that circule in the stl or export. This way you don’t lose any fidelity. Blender does have some great tools for interpolating points in a mesh so it’s not useless either.
The best analogy I can think of is raster and vector. Doubling the size of a vector doesn’t result in aliasing. But, likewise, doing a high quality image of something photorealistic is not great on vector.
I use Fusion for cad modeling. The parametric design workflow allows me to adjust measurements, etc and have them show downstream, etc. But if I’m going to import something that’s already an 3d model I’ll use blender and mesh mixer to cleanup the model first.
I’ve also used just blender when using game assets to pose a model before exporting to a mesh for use in a slicer. Since, again, it’s the tool for the job.