Creation programs

[Olias]

Welcome to the community.

If you’re new to 3D design and have no experience, my advice is to start slowly with basic programs geared towards students and learners. Unless you have prior experience, jumping into a powerful program like Fusion 360 without prior CAD knowledge can be a really frustrating experience and is more likely to discourage future learning.

I recommend starting with simple programs. Here’s a partial list of programs that are ideal for unleashing your creativity without overwhelming you with technology. From there, you can branch out. These are active links and are all free:

1. Windows 3D Builder - Free and available on the Microsoft Store, but it has recently been deprecated, so your OS may be restricted from installing it. However, if you can, it is a very gentle introduction to 3D modeling. In my view, this is where I would start and just experiment. You will likely quickly outgrow it.
2. TinkerCAD - Less of a CAD tool and more of a “tinkerer’s tool,” it has a lot of enhancements and is more of an intermediate program. The advantage is that it is cloud-based, making it completely hardware agnostic. A good jumping off point for learning 3D modeling principles.
3. Meshmixer - Also from Autodesk, but far more basic. If you’re making “craftsy” type things like a Christmas ornament, this and 3D builder are probably best suited for that sort of work whereas TinkerCAD is more oriented towards mechanical modeling.

From there, you’ll be able to get a “feel” for what you like and don’t like. If you’re considering and determined to move towards true CAD, you may want to take a look at a recent post to another member who asked the same question. The TL;DR version of this is while Fusion 360 is powerful, the free version is very restrictive in my experience and runs best on fast hardware. I have fast hardware and I have chosen other CAD solutions for my day to day 3D printing work. But know there are a lot of folks here who have over a decade of muscle-memory and will swear by their individual CAD solution. You must judge for yourself what your appetite is for how steep a learning curve you wish to climb.

Dovetail joints not cutting properly

That is the holy grail I have been seeking for the purposes of cleanly editing STL models. I can tell you, that such a piece of software does not exist. The problem is too deep to go into a single post but there was a debate here last year that can be found in this post that espoused a lot of ill-informed opinions on the accuracy of STEP vs STL. That can be found here. The TL;DR version of that post is that STEP models are inherently accurate because they include the parametric data that makes …