BEST FREE CAD / 3D Modelling software 2024 - I tested them all!

I think we can all agree that 3D printers are an incredible technology but they can only 3D print designs that we create and if you're sick of just downloading things off the internet to print and you want to dip your feet into 3D modeling your own things well you've come to the right place because in 2024 there is a plethora of 3D modeling programs that are completely free but which ones are worth your time well I'll be honest I had no idea I first got to 3D modeling back when I was 15 and the Landscapes changed so much since then and I was honestly surprised how many options there are out there and then disappointed at the limitations a lot of them have so I took it upon myself to test out 10 free CAD programs you can get in 2024 to see which one is best let's get started expic how's it going guys Angus here from makers music some of you might remember I did a video similar to this back in 2019 well unfortunately that video is now completely outdated the landscape's completely changed since then for better and for worse but there are still so many options if you want to learn CAD or computer aided design I don't want to be clear here that I'm talking about Cad and not organic 3D modeling CAD or comp computer AED design is really designing stuff for mechanical use and precision drawing but it's not like free form sculpting so if you're an artist and you like to do free form sketching and sculpting almost like working with virtual clay there are many other programs that do that sort of thing that's not what I'm covering in this video I'm covering programs that you can use to design headphone holders phone mounts and different things around the house that need precise measurements to precise holes and hold positions to then recreate that with 3D printing and if you like a tldr well here is a complete list of all the programs I'm going to talk about in this video but be warned there is no best freead program I wish there was but each of these programs in this list have very strong pros and very strong cons and it's up to you to decide what suits your needs best and to properly test out all of these CAD programs I designed this this is the opsource maker coin I first came up with the idea of maker coins way back in like 2015 as a way of testing small amounts of material and creating like a Swatch so I could see what the filament looks like and then decide if I want to use it in other projects and the humble maker coin has evolved a lot over the years from just a quick test print to a fantastic first CAD project you can design and print with thousands of people around the world coming up with their own spin on the concept so let me just step you through in Fusion 360 this open- Source mega coin design and I'll be sharing the full plans online including the source files so you can use this as a basis to test and learn in whatever CAD program you choose it starts off with a side profile that is then revolved to create the main body of the coin middle of the coin is 6 mm high and it comes out in this gentle Arc to the outside of the coin which is a circle which has a radius of five um and then we have a center point from the circle to the center of the coin which is 20 mm which gives us an overall size of 50 mm in diameter this profile is then revolved to create the body of the maker coin and then we do another sketch this circle is simply a sketch that's placed at a certain distance from the center of the coin it's 55 mm in diameter or 27.5 uh mm from the center of the coin and it's 14 mm in diameter then that circle is removed from the body of the maker coin which is an extrude cut or a a hole or depending what the software calls it essentially it removes the material of that Circle from the coin then we apply a shamer to these edges of 2 mm and then we patent these details the shampa and the extruded cut around the body of the maker coin eight times so you end up with this look and then finally some text is punched out of the middle of the maker coin which is offset from the on the bottom of the maker coin 5 mm so it doesn't cut all the way through and just simply does that detail at the top now I haven't fully defined the the font and the size of the font because I found with all these different CAD programs doing text is wildly different some can't do it at all some can only do it by doing weird hacky things so my testing methodology is this I want to make this coin as closely accurately as possible to the reference here in Fusion 360 so I'm going to have the revolve using the original sketch then doing the extrude cut and patent and then the fillets if possible in the CAD program testing and then finally the text extrude out the coin and then these will be 3D printed I don't really know what the fairest way is of deciding which program to start with so I'm just going to put them all into this little baggie mix them up and pull out a random one and our first program to check out is onshape on shape is a CAD program that runs completely on the cloud which means all you need is a web browser and a strong internet connection to get access to an an incredibly powerful modeling Suite now this does mean you can't ever go offline if you want to use on shape you have to use it on the cloud and it means that they can change anything at any time which they did quite a few years ago I actually originally started using onshape on the channel because it was a great alternative to Solid Works which I didn't have access to anymore after leaving University because it's crazy expensive and on shape was effectively equivalent to the modeling style and power of solid works but free however over time they did clamp down on the free tier and Ratched up the cost of the paid subscription which means now that if you want to use on shap for free it has a strong caveat all of your models are publicly accessible you can't design anything in the free tier Ron shape and keep it private which might be perfect for you if you're designing stuff just for a hobby or in my case for example with the maker coin allowing me to easily share it with you guys doesn't affect me but if you're designing stuff for business or it's proprietary or you know you want to keep it secret you cannot do it for free and on shape you have to pay the subscription and it's not that cheap for a business totally fine for a hobbyist it's unreasonable as someone who has experience with solid works and fusion 360 learning on shape and its interface was honestly a breeze it was the easiest out of all the cad programs I've tested that I'm not uh that I don't use every day that I could just get in and start modeling uh getting this coin done was almost the same as the process in Fusion 360 uh just a slightly different layout so here on the left with on shape fully parametric you can step through this design feature tree you roll it back all the way to start like this and here you can see I've got my original sketch what I do like about on shape is it's very forgiving with your profiles if they have intersecting geometry for example this circle is a full circle not just an arc and then this line here which I'm using as a tangential relation to that top of the maker coin it's not geometry that's used in the model but it doesn't care about it being there in the first place often C programs will require you to snip away geometry to make a full cohesive uh profile or it requires you to turn things into what's called construction geometry where it's like not not seen in the actual creation of the solid bodies but I found like Fusion 360 on shapes very forgiving because all you do when you go to your your um process with revolve you just simply click what profiles you want to use in the revolve and then revolve access you can simply say where you want to revolve from so it could be here for example but we want to revolve from the center of the coin very very quick very Snappy even though it's online I I feel no uh lag or anything that's impeding my design process then with my sketch and extr of the corner again exactly the same as Fusion 360 no issues there could do a fillet 2mm fillet no complaints did a circular pattern of that fillet and then finally the text tool is actually very fully featured I actually prefer the text tool in here to the one Fusion 360 because it gives you these fantastic construction geometries which lets you uh perfectly Center text which is notoriously hard to dimension in your object like this and then the extrude works no problems and I offset it from the bottom of the coin simply by doing a depth offset of 5 mm from the bottom where the sketch was and then the coin's complete when it comes to Expo model out of on shap they give you a ton of different formats to choose from and none of these are limited in any way which is really cool to see uh if you want to get a good file for 3D printing with modern slices download is step because that will preserve the curves much better than STL or 3mf but yeah look at these different formats you can export as a solid works format if you want to go back into solid works or you have someone who has that software Rhino uh obj 3mf STL all of these are really really neat so I just going to download as a step no problem different versions of of Step very very cool download that put into your slicer and 3D print your maker coin so by far on shape is one of the most powerful free CAD packages accessible right now now but it does have the two major caveats of your files have to be public you know you're doing this for a hobby totally fine if you're doing it for a business you have to get the the paid plan and they could change it at any time this is fully Cloud so they could update their terms and services they could limit features they could decide they don't want a free plan at all and then your models are lost forever so I do highly recommend if you're using on shape for yourself make sure you download your models when they're done so you have them as a reference on your own computer just in in case something changes because they have changed things in the past I don't know if they're going to change them again in the future okay what do we have next design spark design spark is a free CAD solid modeling program from RS Components and it's been heavily requested by you guys here on the channel and I'll be honest I'd never actually checked it out so I downloaded it from their website you do need to sign up to make an account and you sign in once but it is downloaded to the computer so it doesn't run on the cloud which is nice and this is the me coin I managed to do in design spark mechanical so it looks pretty good I managed to get it done almost correctly except for the text which we'll get to in a second uh but the thing about this software is it is sketch based so you do a sketch and you can do things to it but it's not parametric you can't go back to that sketch and edit it it's direct modeling so you can push pull modify surfaces as you go along and you can undo obviously but you can't go back in time with a feature tree as such there's no functionality like that in design spark the interface for design spark mechanical feels a little bit outdated and uh little bit confusing if you're coming from software like solid works or Fusion 360 it's still sketch based so for example I go to sketch mode and then I can uh draw for example a rectangle on the the YX plane here there's all sorts of relations that you might be familiar with like coincident you've got tangential and that sort of thing so you can do a lot of very ACC accurate measured drawing in design spark and then when you're done this is where you might get a bit confused so you're looking for like an extrude or revolve function but instead you have this thing called pull and with pull it can do a pull Direction which is an extrude or it can revolve or you can even sweep if you have a guide curve to sweep the object for example I could turn this square into a cube or I could revolve it so for example I select revolve select the object and then the rot and then revolve it or you can do a combination of both so I can do an extrude like this pull the object out say pull it out 10 and then I can select revolve choose that face choose the axis I want to revolve it around and then revolve it like that so it's pretty cool and intuitive in that regard but I don't like the fact you can't go back and then change the sketch to update it uh it's lacking that functionality which in my eyes makes it quite limited however if you know exactly what you want to do then creating something like the maker coin is quite simple I just did a SC sketch with a revolve and then I did a cutout here for the edge of the coin and then I patented that around and then doing a fill it no problem at all but doing text in design spark is really bad uh it's essentially a hack uh all the tutorials show how to do it but you basically use dimensioning tools so this is a dimensioning tool to select different areas of the sketch like that and you get text this way and then you project this text into the geometry and then you can use that to do an extrude and it's a really dodgy way of doing it the reason that it's backwards is because I projected it off this this back plane so the text was facing the wrong way and you can't change it in any way you have to make sure you're projecting in the right direction to do it right so it's not a great way of doing text so I don't like that however if you're okay with a direct modeling style in uh design spark then give it a go it's free and it downloads to the computer so you don't need an internet connection for it to work and next we have 3D Builder yep bet you didn't see that that one coming if you have Windows 10 or 11 then you have 3D Builder built in right now and this is a really important program to know about because it can do a lot of useful things for 3D printing not only does it have a really powerful file repair functionality where you can dump your file in and it will actually repair bad meshes to make them suitable for 3D printing but you actually model basic things in 3D Builder and I never really thought about it until I came across a random video on YouTube where someone was doing their model in this software and it's basic but it did the job if you want a 3D model in 3D Builder it's very similar to Tinker cat in which you start with Primitives then you change their dimensions then you can add or subtract them to make more complex shapes you can drag in existing STL files that you might have already where you want to modify them or you can start from scratch with some Primitives built in so for the maker coin this is actually if you think about it a Taurus with you know the outside shape and then you've got a that cut in the top we revolve it but it's actually just a sphere with the right dimensions cutting in and then you've got those cutouts which are cylinders around the outside by doing that you can end up with this which is our maker coin now it doesn't have any fillets or anything because well this is not a CAD program let me stress that 3D Builder will not replace a proper CAD software it just won't it's fantastic for quickly modifying STL files or creating very simple objects I do really like the built-in ability to emboss or deboss text like I mean this does it really well but design spark mechanical can't you know go figure uh but this is not a CAD program but for simple things it might suit you perfectly and it's built in right there in Windows 10 and 11 ready to go it's lightweight it's easy to use and you know it kind of does the job so maybe it'll do it for you as well all righty what do we have next freead what the aster this is freead and I know this is going to upset a lot of people but despite freecad being an open-source parametric 3D modeling program I can't use it I've never been able to use it the navigation is just so foreign to me despite having years of cat experience just starting a sketch on a plane in the part design workflow I I don't know how it works that all changed with onzo which is a modified version of freead done by a company so it takes this and turns it into this and in my opinion this has revolutionized the accessibility of freead yes it is a company so now it's no longer completely open source but it is free unless you want additional functionality that you don't need as an individual and it's made it so much easier to use freecad so if you're given freead a go before and you couldn't get it to work like you just couldn't navigate it give onzo a go because this has changed my opinion of the whole software suite and I was able to do a really really funky maker coin using it so you fire up onzo and it says what do you want to do so I want to do a standard part and then it goes into this workspace which is freead it's just been modified with a slightly different user interface so from here it's got this task bar of the side and it's really intuitive it says what do you want to do so I want to create a sketch all right create a sketch what plan do I want to create that sketch on I want to create it on the XZ plane for the side of the revolve and in the sketch workflow you're greeted with a lot of familiar functionality so you have the different kinds of sketches so I can draw a line from here to here I can draw another line here to here I can drop an arc in so like here to here I can drop a another one in from here to here uh and then you can drop in your relations so I can do a tangential constraint and then I can constrain this Arc with this one uh this line with this Arc and it's really intuitive it's little there's little popups telling you what to do so coming from Fusion 360 um I had very little uh issues adapting to this user interface but here's one I prepared earlier this is the maker coin that I did in the onzo version of freead uh the rotation a little bit weird you hold down uh I might change this but you hold down the the scroll wheel and then click to uh orbit around the object it's a little bit strange don't really like that however but really cool thing here on the left hand side you can see we have a feature tree so we can go back at any time to change uh original sketches so I can go back in change the original sketch I did for that revolve and say okay well I want this to be 8 mm in diameter all right and that's update that and then close the sketch and there you go it's updated perfectly uh well not quite perfectly where I have the text needs to be punched up higher but again I can go in and change that and that's just a taste of the the functionality within uh the onzo branch of freecad you can do full assemblies there's functionality for online collaboration and that sort of thing Cloud things I'm not interested in that uh if you are then it might be a very viable alternative to something like on like on shape or Fusion 360 but for me just this this functionality alone is groundbreaking for a free program and the export options in this software are wonderful so if you go to file uh I'll select the model first body file export you can see just how many different options we have for export move that out way uh so many um we can export all these crazy different formats most modern slicers can import step files now which is fantastic so you can go down here and then export as a step no worries but don't rush out and download this version of freead right away I do have a few small complaints and this is a few caveats to it complaint number one doing the text is very possible but kind of of annoying uh you have to navigate manually to the font file like there is no drop down of fonts you have to go find them on your system which is very strange to me because they'd be the same place on every Windows system but um yeah you have to navigate to it maybe it's cuz it's you know open source and it can be used in different operating systems I'm not sure but you do need to go do that and it's a little bit clunky another possible gotcha with onzo is the fact that it is a private company building on open source software so what they offer could change at any point and at the end of the day they need to recoup their investment so they might change what you get when you get the software So currently for free you get the cad suite and it works offline so you can download that right now fantastic but if you want uh anything else like the ability to upload large amounts of files and collaborate with other people you have to start paying you pay very little $10 a month right now all the way up to you know Enterprise versions with all sorts of crazy stuff but this could change at any time so just be aware of that but it's a in my opinion very small gotcha I totally understand that a lot of people are upset with open source software being coopted by private companies but I'm really sorry the version as it stands of freead right now isn't usable in my opinion this makes it usable coming from something like solid works or Fusion 360 and hey it's free so I'm all for it all right we're about halfway there next up we have blender bet you didn't see this one coming but it's not the blender you think it is it's blender with an add-on called CAD Sketcher blender has to be by far one of the most famous and popular free 3D modeling Suites out there it's completely open source community supported and it's been used for so many different applications originally it was for 3D animation then it slowly became more useful for you know 3D modeling for game design and that sort of thing and now more and more useful for 3D printing as well but I would say the most of the functionality out of blender is more suitable for for artistic use and applications that don't need precise measured drawing because the software just doesn't really offer that out of the box however I came across an add-on for blender that changes all of that and for someone like me who likes to do sketched base modeling changed everything and it's called CAD Sketcher CAD Sketcher brings measure drawing into blender and it's fully parametric which means you can go back into your sketch up update it and then the model will update to suit it is really funky it's really early days but CAD Sketcher already shows so much promise and I was able to pretty much make this maker coin with very little issue except for a few caveats that we'll talk about so here I've got my maker coin in blender and all the geometry you see except for the text has been created using CAD Sketcher so here we have a little addin navigation folder called Sketcher when you install the add-on there's a full walkthrough on how to do it and there's heaps of tutorials for CAD Sketcher which is wonderful I'll link many in the description below uh but what's really neat is this for example I go into this original sketch for my revolve I can edit that and then let's uh navigate to look at it the big thing going between all these CAD programs is like the navigation hot keys are all different it's really frustrating anyway cool so here you can see the profile for that revolve and you notice it looks very familiar it's like most other measured drawing in other software you've got your your Dimensions so for example this is 10 mm in diameter you've got little uh little constraints there that little tangential constraint we've got little uh here like vertical and horizontal constraints and these are all created as entities and dimensions here that you can navigate through in the sketching workflow so for example if I need to Dimension this outer curve of the maker coin you see it's currently not dimensioned but everything updates very very nicely with it I can just go to diameter and then select it and then it drops in a diameter and then here on the right hand side I can select that that diameter and I can change it to what what I want so like eight updates to eight or I can change it to 10 which what it should be and you go around and me and fully constrain your drawing like this and then when you're done you can assign it as a different entity so for example I assign it as a mesh and then if I have that sketch selected this is when the blender side takes over so blender works with what's known as modifiers so these will apply an effect to the geometry and the really neat thing about modifiers is that they're not permanent until you bake them in you can go through and change these at any time to update your model until you're done and you're happy and you can export it so for example this uh sketch starts with a screw modifier which is essentially the the blender version of a revolve so for example it's got 360° there make it 180 and then it's broken a few things but that's okay you can see here it's only 180 there so okay we want to complete it so 360 that sweet now I've got that other sketch for that cutout on the side of the maker coin again that's measured at 14 mm I could change that to I don't know 10 maybe and then update that and then everything updates and that sketch there has been boing differenced from the original maker coin so a lot of these terms might seem familiar if you're coming from other CAD programs and really it's not too difficult to learn so for a lot of simple Parts where you've got arrays of holes and simple geometry very very usable I would recommend giving CAD Sketcher a go but the issue here is if you want to do anything more crazy like if I want to fill it this maker coin well then you have to start breaking geometry so what you have to do is you need to bake those modifiers to create a uh a final shape and then you have to modify that baked geometry I don't know if that's the right term but essentially you cannot apply a fillet to this blender will let you do fillets you know it's a different modifier and different workflow but it's back to its more traditional workflow of working with a solid object and modifying it uh to suit you can't really have the parametric functionality that CAD Sketcher gives you if you want to use those features in terms of the export quality from blender you do need to export as a mesh so as a STL for example and you'll notice that the top of the maker coin has these facets now again those are the triangles I mentioned and blender exports will have those triangles because it's a mesh based workflow uh but for example I'm going into screw here I noticed that um I've only got 16 steps and that would be the 16 steps you can see here so I could increase this to have higher detail but obviously the more triangles you shove into the model the higher the the larger the file size and the more intensive it is to work on the model in the software so do keep that in mind so I'd say CAD Sketcher is absolutely perfect if you already use blender but you want to add some measur drawing CAD style capability to your workflow because it is really really neat and you can download it from gumroad it is free everything in this list is free but throw the guys a few bucks you know it's absolutely worth it and then enjoy this extra functionality in blender because blender is open source it will always be available it'll be on your computer forever it's yours to keep definitely worth checking out next up Fusion 360 if you're familiar with my Channel at all then you'll know that I've been using Fusion 360 from Autodesk for years now and it's gotten better and better with each successive year with more functionality and it's an incredible piece of software it runs on your computer but needs Cloud connectivity to function properly so you do need an internet connection at all times and well it's free sort of so the big issue with Fusion 360 is over the years is they've been reducing the capability of the free version and making it harder and harder to maintain a free version because well fair enough they've invested all this money into the software they want to get their return on investment they want you to jump on to the paid plans the catch is the paid plans are not cheap so a couple of years ago I actually jumped on from a uh startup license to a paid plan because I'm using it for a job this is a job on YouTube I know it doesn't seem like it is but basically I'm using it for work so I pay for a license when I jumped in they had a very special locked in price where I said it wasn't going to change I pay $420 Australian each year so it's not a huge amount to me because I use it for my work but for a hobbyist that would be a lot but here's the thing that's not what it is anymore if you wanted to pay Fusion 360 now and jump on it's $1,000 a year Australian to get a license for Fusion 360 and that's just the like the base version of fusion 360 if you want to get all the additional functionality they have on offer uh like analysis and Cam and all this other stuff you have to pay more so it gets very expensive very fast and it's kind of the Catalyst for this video because so many of my tutorials were made with the expectation that Fusion 360 would be free to use for hobbyists but it's getting harder to do that so this video is to give people options in case it's no longer viable if you're a student well you can get access to any Autodesk software not just f for free as long as you get a student ID but as soon as you sort of enter that sort of awkward space of doing it as a hobby um they're making it a bit more difficult you can get it but I don't know how long it's going to be possible and I'll be completely up front with you guys I'm going to keep using and paying for Fusion 360 for my own models because I can use it really effectively and I'm really quick at modeling in it and it does exactly what I want this mea coin took me like 5 minutes it has the feature tree at the bottom where I got my sketch and then it does a revolve and then it does another cut you know here um I've got the the hot Keys all dialed in they work great and then I can do that that fillet the pattern and then punch some text in it's perfect it works fantastic for me but it might not be the solution that you're looking for if you're just getting in as a hobby or alternatively if you're trying to make a business like bootstrap a business and you need CAD software well then maybe you can't afford the licensing for fusion and maybe the functionality here is just a bit more than you need maybe those other options that I've mentioned might be more suitable but it's no surprise that the exported file from Fusion I used a step export made a fantastic maker coin and yeah it does a really really good job next is shaper 3D shaper 3D is a fairly new modeling program that's come onto the block lately I've seen Uncle Jesse say that he uses it a lot for his simple modeling and a lot of you guys suggested I checked it out it's very easy to get shape of 3D it's actually on the Windows store or you can actually download it for tablet use and that sort of thing and it has these different pricing tiers now this is the thing you do have to pay for proper functionality and they make it painfully obvious how limited the free version is but the free version lets you do two projects it gives you access to the modeling tools and it lets you export a low resolution STL file that's it and I we'll get to how much of annoyance and uh uh that is in a second but let's go to shape of 3D the software itself was very intuitive when you fire it up it giv you a wizard to learn how the modeling interface Works takes about 5 minutes and once you've done that wizard if you've got any 3D modeling experience then you'll pick it up right away and what I really like about it is sort of like a combination of parametric and free form um direct modeling so on the the right here you do have a history tree so you can go back in and change any of these functions you've done and the model will update so for my sketch I can go to that sketch and then I can update it so let's say I want want to change the size to 12 like that um and it moved up for some reason the revolution I can go through and change that you know maybe I just want it to be a little bit or bigger it's very direct um and very easy to use and doesn't throw errors so a lot of CAD programs will uh throw errors if you break stuff down the line it just kind of tries to make it work it doesn't really seem to care like for example go to the pattern wonderful like say I I want six nubin on the side updates wonderful really quick and for 25 bucks us a month I can see this being a really worthwhile investment if you want to just have access to basic 3D modeling that's really really intuitive and fast and again designed to work on a tablet it's very um very easy to to be Hands-On you can see how like when you click numbers it pops up with like you just just touch in the dimensions you want which I really like the only issue is the free version is essentially like a limited trial there's not really the the ability to use the free version for anything more than just trying the software out because you know you'll see it says unlock all the features it's trying to make you pay and if you go to file and then export you'll notice that oh pro pro pro pro pro pro what can I do I can only export as a 3mf or a STL at a low resolution and when they say low they mean low it is abysmally low like it has decimated the quality of this maker coin which means that when it comes to designing an amazing object and exporting it you're going to be pretty peeved off if you discover it right at that end uh end stage there so I'm telling you guys right now the free version is great is a great way to get access to the software and try it out but when it comes to exporting especially you have lots of Curves on your object you will have to pay for the the um subscription um the free export is just so uh low resolution that you can actually see all the triangles in the 3D print it's really not acceptable but I actually quite like how streamlined and easy to use a software is and for 25 bucks a month it's a heck of a lot more affordable than some of the other options I've talked about in this list when it comes to their paid tiers next up Tinker CAD Tinker CAD is the OG easyto use accessible 3D modeling program it's been around since 2011 and I used to teach this to kids at at uh High School like even early High School level like 13 14 year old and they would just pick it up instantly but fun fact Tinker CAD almost ceased to exist over 10 years ago what happened was the company behind it was working on another big startup idea which used the computers and the grunt that they were using to run tinkercad because it's all cloud-based and they were like we're going to be focusing on that we're closing down Tinker cat it was an experiment we done it it's run its course and the outcry was so large that Autodesk stepped in to buy Tinker Cad and save it and it's still to this day free to access you just make an account log in and you can start 3D tinkering and look Autodesk for all the stuff they've done you know changing the price of fusion 360 taking away features you can thank them for actually keeping Tinker cat alive because it is a great entryway into 3D modeling for kids and some adults that's just the thing though Tinker CAD isn't really a CAD program for what you might expect a CAD program to be essentially what it is is a library of Primitives that you can bring in change their dimensions and then add or subtract them from each other to make more complicated shapes so for example I'll grab this Cube from the right hand side and then I'll grab a uh this this cylinder that's turned into a hole and in Tinker CAD a hole Cuts away whereas a solid will combine so you can turn anything to a hole and anything into a solid but to combine these objects you select both of them and then you do group and what this will do is cut away the hole from the solid uh for example if I wanted to add it to it I could change the the cylinder to a solid and then now when I group them they add together like this which is great right so you can do some pretty simple stuff very quickly and you see it's definitely a for kids cuz you can go in and like drag in like oh yeah look a little figurine yay looks looks very Among Us you do have the ability to Dimension stuff in Tinker CAD but it's not the kind of dimensioning might be expecting so when you drag an object in you need to make sure you have a ruler dragged in as well without that it's very very basic functionality uh with the ruler and the object selected it will show all these dimensions and millimeters this is showing the bounding box of the object and where it is in relation to the origin of the ruler so ruler is here you can see I can move it up to here and then for example the height I can change the height of the box to 10 moves it down like that and you can also free for move it around as well the issue here is when you want to design stuff that's complex like this maker coin these Dimensions aren't really good enough and I'll demonstrate that by just deconstructing this maker coin so to do that I'm just going to ungroup everything so you can see how I've done it I've created all of these cylinders that are patented around the object but there is no pattern tool it's like 3D Builder so what I had to do is Select each cylinder and position it in exactly the right spot based off just the external bounding Dimensions so for example if I select everything and try to make it you know Z Z it's not going to put the center point on zero it's going to put the outer edge of the bounding box on zero so essentially what I did is I took the outer diameter divided it by two made that the measurements for the bounding box and then did the same sort of thing for the cylinders you know these are 14 mm in diameter there's no diameter functionality it's 14 + 14 so I had to divide that in two so it's seven and then add it or subtract it from the diameter of the cylinder in the middle to get it in the right place so you can see just how quickly this gets really annoying um and not really great for precise measurements there is the ability to align things in terms of like equal spacing or aligning them along an edge but it doesn't really help for radial stuff like this so to do this radial stuff like I did in 3D Builder I simply you know grouped these two and then copy pasted them put them in the right position you know using the dimensions cuz you can see that's not correct uh and then I rotated them the correct amount like so and then you end up with a coin like this no fillets or anything fancy like that and quite a low polygon uh finish because that's just how Tinker cat works the The Primitives in there are fairly low polygon count meshes to do the functionality so look Tinker CAD is a great first entry point I think for children and you can even bring 3d uh models into it like you can bring STL files into Tinker Cad and modify them in a similar way but I don't think that Tinker CAD offers much in terms of its modeling aspect more than 3D Builder does on the computer however tinkercad has all this other stuff they're built in now that you can do like electronic circuits and like programming basic programming languages to make Tinker cat objects almost like open scad and even physics based simulations now as well so if that sort of stuff's interesting definitely worth checking out because again it is free for personal use and education but for 3D modeling of like complex shapes yeah uh I would not recommend it um if you want precise holes precise dimensions and that sort of thing use another program and last but certainly not least we have selfcad selfcad is a bit of a weird one to include here it's not uh suitable for measured drawing or any sort of parametric modeling it's actually more like Tinker CAD with a bit of extra functionality in terms of modeling that style where you have these Primitives on the left hand side that you can bring in and modify to your liking or you can create shapes with a shape generator or you can draw draw but it's not measured drawing it's like you know drawing a shape that's going to become a 3D object that you can then modify the free version lets you do a couple of things but a lot of it's locked down to their paid version so for example I can't use a lot of these different tools like to do a proper pattern for example is locked away and sculpting is locked away and then when you create these Primitives you can then like combine them or difference them apart from each other so for example with this text that I created using the text generator I can select that and the coin and then I can use Stitch and scoop which is essentially booing differences or booing operations I can do a booing difference and I can select what um what I want to difference away which is a function I actually quite like to see sometimes some software makes it a bit difficult to know what you're removing what you're keeping and then you do a preview and then it cuts away totally fine but again cuz this is a mesh um when it comes to like doing a fillet or that sort of thing uh it's very challenging because you can't actually select just the edge because you can see it's made up of all these little like lines and triangles and uh yeah the free version is quite locked down I couldn't test out any of these other features and if you wanted to pay for the pro version uh it's only $15 a month which does unlock an awful lot but if I was going to choose between this and something like shape of 3D for what I want to do for 3D modeling which is having a feature tree sketch based functionality and all that sort of thing well you know the one I would probably go for as such the mega coin looks okay but it's lacking the fillets and the diens of the the scoop in the middle aren't quite correct because it doesn't have the proper tangential curve to the outside edge which it would have if I could do a proper measured drawing and revolve approach so there you have it all of the free CAD programs I could track down for this video to make a ton of maker coins I spent so long learning these different CAD programs for you guys and I really really hope this video has been helpful to find a program that might suit your needs that is completely free to get started in the wonderful world of 3D modeling and 3D design however I will say that there's been a lot cut out of this video in terms of actually modeling each of these coins in each of their respective softwares they're going to choose the most suitable programs out of this list I think are useful for parametric card modeling I'm going to make a tutorial for each in how to make the open source maker coin and upload it to the makers Muse Community page which is only five bucks a month to get access to behind the scenes content you can ask your troubleshooting questions share your really cool projects and it supports the channel a great deal so you can find a link to that in the description below thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you again very shortly here on me Muse catch out guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 699,331

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: J--QVhGheP4

Length: 41min 37sec (2497 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024