I am not a design draftsman, I’m not an engineer. My workflow is usually: I put something on the scanner, load the calibrated scan, trace the outline, throw a few sketches on various planes in there, round a few edges, print it and I’m done.
Fusion 360 scratches that itch very well but requires me to keep a Windows VM and also their free model felt more and more unusable. OnShape is a nice substitute that works fine for me, but I don’t like the “free or 1500€/year” approach. Without a middle ground subscription for makers it feels that I could lose anything the second their energy prices for servers go up or something.
The list of CAD software is exhaustive, so I am looking for recommendations that fit my “eh, click, click, click, good enough” workflow. FreeCAD is way too unintiuitive for that. I have tried getting into it, but 3D printing is a tool for me and the learning curve quickly made using it another hobby.
So. Suggestions welcome. Scalding criticism about my lack of enthusiasm and consumer mentality not so much, but I guess that comes bundled with useful advice, so, eh, I’ll take it.
I found Freecad has become fairly intuitive if you already have traditional parametric cad experience, there’s definitely a few quirks but generally super easy to adapt to if you come from solidworks, inventor and the like, trying to convince my dad to give it a try as he’s been getting back into design since retiring and he’s been paying for a solid works license. Personally use ondsel but mainline freecad is totally usable.
Edit: Yeah, just use the RealThunder fork, was running into the Topological Naming Problem a few times today which was frustrating me on top of a few other (probably self induced) annoyances. I was using the mainline freecad before with ModernUI Workbench as a plugin which gives you ribbon menus, I actually prefer it over the UX changes on the most recent Ondsel release.