Selecting a free 3D CAD option - 3D design for 3D printing pt1

do you want to learn to design your own parts for 3d printing well you're in the right place because your journey starts here [Music] my favorite type of 3d printing is when i have a little problem around the house and i'm able to design a custom pad that i 3d print and solve the problem based on the comments of my last video many other 3d printer owners are the same but where does that leave those who want a 3d printer or already own one but don't yet have those skills i ran a poll last week to see if there was an audience for a tutorial series more than 6 000 votes suggest a resounding yes in this video we get started by comparing the various cad options available and set up our choice for this tutorial series i want to start by making what should be an obvious point when choosing cad the best option is the one that works best for you if you come across someone who recommends a cad option and tells you in absolute terms that it's the best option by far and that anyone that disagrees is an idiot i would suggest that that person is very poor at considering the perspectives of others choosing cad is very subjective just like it is when you choose which slicer program to use they all aim to achieve the same purpose but the implementation and importantly the interface differs for instance cura is a very popular and obviously capable slicer but i just can't wrap my head around the accordion ui which is why i prefer the interface of prusa slicer or super slicer if you take the time to print back-to-back comparison prints with the different slices you'll learn that they're all quite capable each has some minor points of differences and pros and cons but ultimately they can all do a good job so you should pick the one that best clicks with you in the comments for my poll there's a lot of suggestions for which cad program i should and shouldn't cover for this series of tutorials and in my current position it's impossible to keep everyone happy but you should know that i have read each comment and i have considered your input so with that in mind let's look at some available options for 3d cad packages now this list is not exhaustive instead it's all of the cad programs that i've used over the years most of these are actually quite similar in their approach and their workflow but there are still some categories that we can distinguish the odd one out on this list because you can't group it with anything else to make a category is openscad or openscad as you can see you can make 3d models but i think it's best summarized by this text here the program is solid 3d cad modeler and that's because to create the shapes you need to write lines of code some people absolutely love this but i imagine the vast majority will find it quite difficult so our first actual category is cad software that's aimed at beginners and as a former teacher these are all programs that i've taught to younger children sketchup i previously invested a lot of time in finding the best plugins to extend its capabilities and creating a series of tutorials for my students to use in terms of 3d printing it was very hard to get sketchup to output geometry that was manifold or better known as watertight in simple terms that meant that the stls that you exported for 3d printing were generally full of errors 123d design from autodesk was an option that improved on this greatly it was quite accessible for students completely free but ultimately stopped being supported by autodesk which means it's not really a viable option so in my opinion of these beginner options tinkycad is by far the best it works like lego by dragging and dropping different blocks you can then rotate them or set their dimensions and you can group together various shapes to combine them including setting some shapes as a whole which means i will subtract from the rest of the shapes tinkercad is simple enough to learn from a single video and i have such a video linked below in the description but its initial ease of use can end up being a barrier to creating more advanced geometry later on let's consider we have a cube and we want to round the edges what's known as a fillet in tinkercad this is actually very hard you can get there but it's a lot less straightforward than the more advanced cad programs that we're going to focus on and that leaves us with our final category which is parametric 3d solid modelers let's have a look at what they have in common the first thing to understand is that these programs are solid modellers that means the models are watertight and suitable for 3d printing if we compare that to a surface or mesh modeler we can see that it's possible to actually delete some of the surfaces and that ruins the integrity of the model particularly for 3d printing the next part of the terminology is parametric but that just means that the models are derived from parameters all of the parameters or steps that we've taken to create the model will be listed down the side of the interface or in the case of fusion 360 along the bottom for instance to make this simple 3d cube there are three steps the first is a dimension 2d sketch we then make it 3d by extruding it up a certain height and then finally we apply a fillet to make the corners round the major advantage of using a parametric modeler is that we can change these parameters whenever we like for instance i'm going to make this cube only 50 instead of 100 and after we save our change we can see our 3d model is rebuilt with the new parameters and this approach makes our models infinitely editable for complicated models we can end up with a very long list of steps used to create them but with a parametric modeler at any point we can go back to any of these steps and edit the dimensions to make adjustments save the change and everything will rebuild with the new parameter and this is why i think parametric solid 3d modelers are best for 3d printing we tend to make iterations that hone in on the perfect fit so this type of cad lets us easily update the design we've narrowed down to one category but which one will we choose for this series i've used each of these some more than others and the cad package i actually learnt on at university was solidworks for professional use it's ludicrously expensive but occasionally there are offers for hobbyists to use the program free of charge but this is not guaranteed so we'll move on autodesk inventor is another option i've used quite a bit previously creating tutorials for f1 in schools it's free for education but not intended for free hobbyist use a free option that seemed to be divisive is freecad it's the only option here that is 100 free and not only that it's actually open source as well however for every person praising freecad there was another claiming it was limited buggy or had a poor interface and previously when i tested it it didn't quite have what i needed on this list by far the most popular is autodesk fusion 360. and i think the biggest selling point is the different environments that you can switch to for different types of work that includes a nice set of cam tools for cnc routing and milling but since we're focusing on 3d printing they're not as attractive here an issue that i've seen discussed by those that use it for personal use is the cut down of the free features available for such an account perhaps the most relevant is the limit to having 10 active documents meaning for a frequent user you have to manage your projects between active and inactive states to keep within the limit so out of these available options for this tutorial series what we're actually choosing is on shape the poll comments were also favorable to onshape and it's the one that i'm most familiar with too it's impossible for everyone to be happy with this decision but onshape does have a range of attractive features that i think will appeal to most people so let's go through some first and foremost is accessibility with onshape running completely out of your browser this means once you've made an account you can access all of your models from any computer just by logging in it doesn't matter if you're on windows mac linux or anything else to add to that there's also apps available for android and ios and surprisingly these are fully featured on a tablet with a bigger screen it's feasible to actually create files and edit with all of the regular tools being present but modified to work without right click however on a phone is where i found this most useful if i'm out buying hardware for a project i can inspect the model and take measurements to make sure i get the right parts of course this cloud-based accessibility requires a stable internet connection and if you don't have that this will be an obvious deal breaker for you next up improvements and since you're logging into a website updates to the software are automatic you'll just see a little notification in the top right telling you that there's new features and you can click to see the list if you're interested next up stability and redundancy and i've been using onshape for more than five years now and i've never experienced a single crash this compares very favorably to other cad programs and in terms of redundancy every single change that you make is automatically saved this includes if you're halfway through a sketch and lose internet connection what you had so far will be waiting for you when you're back online there's also a versioning system and every single change you've ever made to your document is automatically saved so even if you make a huge error it's possible to go back in time and restore to a previously good state next up collaboration and organization the interface is very much like google drive all of your projects will be listed and you can make folders if you like to organize them as well as assigning labels and just like google docs you can share your projects with other people to collaborate this part in grey was designed by my best friend david and he shared it with me to check before he commenced 3d printing if we like we can both work on it at the exact same time just like with google docs and when a project is finished and it comes time to publish it you can use the share feature to your advantage we can set the document so anyone with the link can view as well as export individual parts in a format of their choice and pasting this into a file sharing site means you don't need to export all of your parts in step format so quality of life is a strong attraction and that extends into the help and support for any particular tool if we hover the mouse over long enough we'll get a short summary and from within that tool there'll be a question mark that opens a link to a dedicated help page we can click our platform and find step-by-step instructions and almost always there's a video example that's concise and shows the tool in action so what about the actual cad the first thing to know is that onshape was founded by a team that in part contains ceos from solidworks so the foundation is credible so far i've yet to start a project where i felt limited by on shape it's quick and easy for simple projects exporting beautiful stl's for 3d printing and if you're using it for laser cutting you can right click on any surface and export as a dxf i've also been able to successfully complete complex engineering projects these include the creation and dimensioning of complex geometry and creating assemblies with mates that simulate gears and moving parts to check for clearance and if you do find a feature missing there's a good chance someone in the community has created it with what's called feature script think of these like plugins to add additional functionality this particular project use feature script to be able to add naca aerofoil profiles this one i used to create spur gears and this handy feature script models extruded aluminium profiles based off just a straight line to further extend our functionality we have the app store some of these are free and some of them are paid and they add functionality such as rendering and simulation to on shape examples of apps i've covered before include sim scale which i used for computational fluid dynamics cadacio which i've used to make rendered animations to explain concepts and processes on the channel and kirimoto which offers a simplified cam environment for cnc milling 3d printing as well as laser cutting sounds good so what's the catch why is it free not many things in life are actually free so what's the catch here for all of the pay software we've looked at they generally have a free version for students with the hope of building brand loyalty and converting to a professional account when they're older and for software like fusion 360 the deal is similar where the user can use most of the software but limitations are in place to make them consider paying for a fuller version with onshape our free version comes with one caveat and that it only allows us to create public data beyond that there's no limitations in terms of functionality so what does public data actually mean if we go to the public tab we'll see a random selection of what other people are working on however most of these will be shown here because the author has linked to them in a forum or somewhere else if someone malicious was trying to find your project to rip it off they would firstly need to know that it exists and then search for it from the search bar so if you care about keeping your projects anonymous simply give them a title that's not particularly descriptive it's worth noting too that if someone does find your public documents it will be view only and they can make a copy they edit themselves but they can never edit your actual model nothing here is as free as freecad but personally this compromise with onshape doesn't really concern me with all of that out of the way let's get started let's quickly cover how to make our free onshape account they want you to pay money so the right place to click isn't necessarily that obvious but we're going to start by coming to request a trial we'll ignore the professional dialogue and come down to hobbyist and click get free onshape for makers we fill out the form with our details a confirmation email will be sent to us which we click to finish creating our account when you first log in you'll have this interface except you won't have any projects listed and the one thing you probably want to do before you get designing is to come up to your username and then go to my account we have superficial things like changing usernames and profile pictures and we also have a section where we can turn off notifications but by far the most useful is when we come to preferences here we can set our language but vitally the type of units we want whether we're using millimeters for metric or something imperial beyond this most of the default settings will be fine but we do have extra options for how the mouse works as well as what shortcuts appear on the toolbars that's it super easy to get started and in the next episode we'll design our first part and then build in complexity from there learning more about how to model complex objects until we hopefully achieve some sort of mastery thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 3d modelling g'day it's michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 133,607

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, 3d design, design, cad, computer aided design, onshape, fusion 360, freecad, free, hobby, license, solidworks, solidedge, inventor, tinkercad, sketchup, solid modeller, parametric, option, tutorial, cloud, features, auto save, options, units, metric, imperial, create account, account, getting started, lesson, series, mesh, surface, practical printing, export, stl, step, restrictions, public, private, openscad

Id: XHzOzxCQ7MU

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022