Hello Fellow Makers,
I purchased an A1 Mini in March of this year, and before that, I hadn’t touched a 3D printer in nearly 10 years. This purchase was mainly to expose my daughter to the craft. I didn’t expect to fall in love with the A1 Mini, but it’s such a pleasure to use.
Initially, I focused on learning Tinkercad and the Bambu Studio slicer. This led to creating A1 Mini print profiles for various interesting MakerWorld models. Tinkercad is a great tool and easy to pick up, but I started to hit limitations when working with more complex models.
Enter OpenSCAD: parametric design, write code, and see stuff magically appear. As a programmer, OpenSCAD is my tool of choice. I really do love it.
Lately, I’ve noticed I have more ideas that I want to quickly manifest into objects. However, bringing those ideas to life in OpenSCAD can be tediously slow, with a lot of trial and error. I often find myself failing to see designs through because of the effort needed to finish the SCAD code.
I tried Blender for about an hour, and I’m not sure I want to invest the time in learning it right now.
Any advice on what to do next? How has your 3D design path been? What were your major level-up moments?
Feeling sliced out,
JJTechPrints
In my opinion something like Autodesk Fusion is the next good step. Youtube.com/@DesktopMakes is a really good channel to learn, and he has a beginner course for designing for 3d printing that I used to learn. It’s a great way to learn as you create different objects that you can actually print and use! He has more advanced courses as well, and I’m currently looking into them. Courses are on Udemy and Skillshare, he’s Vladimir Mariano on those.
Good luck and happy printing 
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One of my disabilities determines my tool, OpenSCAD.
I have a medical condition called Aphantasia, it means I can’t form mental images, including those of family and friends.
Because of this, I can’t work with traditional 3D model CAD systems. I owned a software company before my other medical issues meant my body wouldn’t function with any reliability anymore and I had to sell the business.
OpenSCAD means I can process the world others imagine in a programmatic way. This works for me.
TinkerCAD is favoured by many, including a popular 3D YouTube guy, CHEP. He is always demonstrating its use to solve the Filament Friday episodes he creates.
Fusion 360 is the one most people recommend. You can get a free personal license with some limitations, nothing that should hobble your creativity. The limited number of projects in the cloud is easily resolved by storing them locally.
Shaper3d and Onshape are also often talked about, I don’t have any experience with those.
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Fusion360 is a powerful tool. However, the free license becomes more limited every year, and the paid license becomes more expensive every year. In addition, in my opinion, more bugs have been appearing lately.
This wouldn’t necessarily be important for the free license - if learning the Fusion360 workflow wasn’t quite difficult for beginners. The time could perhaps be better spent on other tools that are more worthwhile for private users.
Unfortunately, I can’t currently name any such alternatives.
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Give Ondsel a try, they’re making good improvements to it regularly.
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Fusion360 or Solidworks are what professionals typically use. Whatever it is that you might ever want to do within the current state of the art, either one of those can probably do it.
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I started with Tinkercad and moved on to Fusion 360 since that’s what the majority of people suggested, but I’m not a fan of their licensing model. I found it wasn’t too bad to learn, but the more I learned about it the more I didn’t want to invest so much time in learning it and then they pull the rug out from under me.
After a bit more research, I decided to go with FreeCAD. It’s free and opensource, so I never really need to worry about licensing or losing features. It definitely has a much steeper learning curve, but I figure it was worth spending the extra time and effort. I wouldn’t say it’s as polished as the big brand versions, but it has all the features that I need as a hobbyist. My biggest issue is the topological naming issues, which I find myself fighting all the time.
Recently I’ve been using Ondsel, which is FreeCAD with a more polished UI. They’ve also include the topological naming fixes, which has made life a whole lot easier. I may switch back to basic FreeCAD once version 0.22 comes out, since it will also include much of the new UI and naming fixes.
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I am the opposite - my whole 3d adventure was with mesh-based software. Right now I am almost exclusively toying with blender and it is a blast However I do not do precision items, just some simple desk enchancements and cosplay items. For precision/mashining/functional designs I guess CAD would be better. I have heard a lot of people saying Fusion360 is the way to go.
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