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]
There are CAD communities available at: [email protected] or [email protected]
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
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Hopefully one day it'll get an easier ui for fusion 360 and Solid Edge users (like myself). I really want to use free cad but every time I try it's super frustrating to do even basic things and often takes so many extra steps I just end up cading it up in solid edge instead
I don't know why Solid Edge doesn't get more love. IMO it's comparable to Fusion for basic part design, and it's fully local.
I actually got a license for Alibre, so I'll keep using that until my hair finishes turning gray.
I was running into some errors with the FreeCAD Appimage in Linux, but the Windows version is running fairly smoothly, and it's finally getting enough helper prompts and heuristic interface things to be less unwieldy, but it's still FreeCAD. For instance, I'm still trying to find the easiest of three or four kludgey ways to project a face onto a sketch, and none of them are as easy as the purpose-built tool for that in Alibre.
Yeah I wish Solid Edge got more attention! It's absolutely comparable to Fusion, just the slightest bit more convoluted. I love it because I don't have to deal with the cloud garbage, and constant sign outs on fusion.
I'll have to give Alibre a try it looks nice from what I saw on their website! Do you know by chance if it supports 3mf's?
Alibre is nice. I find the workflow pretty sensible, even if (like Solid Edge) it feels like there are sometimes extra clicks. The Atom version is super cheap and still has a proper parametric history, but is nerfed in ways that might feel limiting ( e.g. no Boolean operations, which makes mold-making and some other complex work quite difficult). When I was getting frustrated with FreeCAD, I was starting to look around at subscriptions and realized if I just waited for a sale on a permanent license for their Professional version (I also did payments), it would become a better deal than Fusion or Shapr3D within about two years.
Before that I was using a copy of "BeckerCAD 14 3D Pro" that I got from its German distributor for EUR20 with some reasonable success, but in addition to some truly aged and awkward camera controls and design choices, it also lacks a parametric history.
Best I can tell, Alibre does NOT support 3mf. It supports STL, STEP, and some other single part formats though.