Skip Navigation
3DPrinting @lemmy.world
Krauerking @lemy.lol

Do I need to learn a 3D modeling software?

So, I'm trying to print some older models from thingiverse and I have discovered that basically all the files I want to print have glaring flaws in them.

Internal free floating structures, connector pieces and holes that are the exact same size... So on and so forth...

Do I need to learn a software like CAD or Blender to fix these? I seem to be able to do some basic stuff in Orca Slicer but it honestly seems like as much of a pain to modify the parts there as it would be to use a real software.

Is there one that's easier? I think I messed around with SketchUp once upon a time.

I am worried this feels like opening a can of worms just so that I can make a thing that already exists in a dozen forms better.

70 comments

  • In my view CAD is always worth learning, especially if you understand what prints best on your printer.

    FreeCAD is basically the worse possible beginners tools. Don't get me wrong when you learn it, it's good and comparable to professional CAD software. But the learning curve is dumb.

    Learn the basics first. TinkerCAD is free (from Autodesk) and will get you started. But if you want something which would take you further Fusion360 is fantastic for beginners.

    The workflow of CAD is as follows. Sketch -> Action -> Sketch -> Action. Lets say you want to make a box with a hole in it. Sketch the outer box -> Extrude it -> Sketch the inner box -> Extrude/Cut it.

    • it’s good and comparable to professional CAD software. But the learning curve is dumb

      I have to agree on that. I feel I can only use FreeCAD because I've taught myself SolidWorks years ago and I know what to look for when I want to achieve something. Or said another way, when I want to do something in FreeCAD, my though process is always "In what roundabout, convoluted way can I do in FreeCAD what I used to do in 2 clicks in SolidWorks?". The only reason it works for me is because I know it can be done and I know the intuitive way it should be done.

      I kind of have the same issue in Blender: I've been trying to teach myself Blender for years, but no matter how hard I try, it's just not letting me in. Unlike FreeCAD, I have never known any other software similar to Blender, so I don't know what I'm doing - or rather, what I should be doing - and it's excruciatingly frustrating.

      • The commercial alternative to blender is software like Maya. But I too struggled with Blender, however I feel that's because 3D modelling is different from CAD, since modelling is like molding clay into the shape you want it in, rather than accurately measuring it out like in CAD.

    • I have trouble remembering what key pans and what key rotates view and the thought of actually figuring out how to manipulate the 3D file in FreeCAD felt like it was gonna melt my brain.

      But thank you for the recommendation. TinkerCAD made me feel like I was playing with children's blocks but at least I understand them.

      I also think I'm gonna try get started on learning something else after I brute force this stupid single print. And I think it will just be trying some of them out.

      • Yeah Fusion is the way to go, especially if you are learning. Lots of hate for it around here, due to Autodesk endlessly changing their policies. But there's no point in learning the basics when you don't know if it's you... or the software.

        But if your issue is just navigating the 3D space in FreeCAD, you can set it such that it's the same in TinkerCAD/Fusion 360. FreeCAD calls it Revit, and you can set it in the lower right corner. Hold you mouse over it to show tool tips.

    • If it had as many 2 minute long tutorials on youtube explaining exactly the feature I was looking for as F360 does, FreeCAD would be the best case software

  • I've been reading the other comments, and while people are encouraging, their comments seem a bit too "you HAVE to learn CAD." You definitely don't NEED to know CAD. I made basic parts and modifications in the slicer for nearly a year after I started printing, and it worked really well. However, if you are considering learning a full CAD program, I have two pieces of advice.

    First pertains to if you are working with functional parts. Then you are talking about a parametric CAD program (fusion, onshape, FreeCAD, etc.). In this case, I think it's worth learning for you, and it's not as hard as it seems. You say you have SketchUp experience, so I'm assuming you have decent spatial reasoning. I know someone with no tech literacy nor programming experience who learned a CAD program very well in less than a month of following tutorials in her free time. Just give it a try, and it's a skill you'll be happy to have.

    If you are working with cosmetic parts like miniatures and helmets, then you might need to use something like Blender. Admittedly, that can be even more challenging than the other CAD programs I mentioned. However, if you spend a few hours learning some basics from YouTube, you should be able to do fundemental things like fixing holes.

    Hope this helps. Good luck with your printing endeavors!

  • If you happen to have any background with coding, I recommend OpenSCAD. There are a (relatively) limited set of instructions, easy to pick up if you do any other coding.

  • I had a booth about this at the Bay Area Maker Faire lately.

    If we're all printing the same object on our 3D printers, it's proooobably a lot less trouble to just have someone injection mold it and save us all the trouble. 3D printers are really great for one-offs and mass-customization and things like that. Aaaaaand, I feel like it's kind of an under-appreciated problem in 3D printing. Because, yeah, CAD is hard and we're never going to reach a world where every 3D printer owner is very very comfortable with CAD, and so it should be more of a concrete goal for the 3D printing community to make sure that we're focusing on this problem. It's important that every 3D printer owner can do at least some amount of tweaking and customizing, otherwise we're failing as a community.

    Now, I don't Tinkshame. I spent a lot of time learning Blender, FreeCAD, and OpenSCAD to prove Naomi Wu's assertion that we should all just get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD. The only real problem with it is that it's not really free, it's "free at the pleasure of AutoDesk" where they could raise the "Mission Accomplished" banner at some point and turn it off. And there's not really an open source version of it for roughly the same reason that random thingiverse models are always kinda halfassed and bad. Doing a good TinkerCAD-but-actually-free-by-some-definition is actual work to get everything right and polished and documented and bug-free and nobody really wants to pay for it.

    Also, maybe I am pedantic and obsessive, but I don't really like screwing around too heavily with models in a slicer, so I'd rather they take some of the magical code in the OrcaSlicer/PrusaSlicer/SuperSlicer tree and actually organize it into something that could be TinkerCAD-esque?

    Anyway, the core of the talk of my booth was systems and libraries of 3D printable objects. So, for example, there's the Honeycomb Storage Wall system and some of us have been writing some neat lil OpenSCAD libraries and models for it (and another group of people have been doing similar things in Fusion) where you can make a parametric model so you can measure your flashlight and print a cute 40mm holder for it based on the measurement without having to model things from scratch and it'll click into the HSW wall and it's fine unless you are married to someone who has ommetaphobia and then you need to make sure that the honeycomb is the same color as the wall. And the same is true for Gridfinity, just you can put that in the drawer.

    And there's also a lot of parametric models. I'm not sure what you are looking to print, but there's a decent selection of people who have done stuff in Fusion or FreeCAD or OpenSCAD where you can download the model and change the parameters to get it a lot closer to what you want without going through all of the drama of making it all over again.

    I love using OpenSCAD. I've got a buncha years of experience using various 3D modelling tools at various times and so I can use Blender or FreeCAD quite well actually, but in the end, I do a lot of functional bits and it's so darn easy to just write some code because, actually, I've been working as a professional software engineer for quite some time.

    So... dono, it depends on your aspirations? There were a good number of Gridfinity-like systems that were around before Gridfinity came out and they were ... ok, but not great, but then Gridfinity came along and did a boxy-box system just like was already there but with some interesting tweaks and making it more amenable to real customization and suddenly everybody went gonzo over Gridfinity in particular. So you might not be just making a thing that exists in a dozen forms better if you borrow an idea and make your version of it.

    Also, I learned 3D modelling tools mumble mumble years ago in a failed attempt and/or dodged-bullet because I'd wanted to do games or special effects as a kid. The software I learned on is long gone, but it turns out that once you are thinking about things, it tends to stick? Which means that I learned pottery while visualizing the objects I was making on the wheel as if they were in the CAD window of my mind, got good at photographic lighting based on what I'd observed in the 3D program, and then transitioned back to CAD because I wanted to make things, so it's kinda one of those things where you probably won't waste the time spent.

    tl;dr: I learned OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender to prove that Naomi Wu is right and we should all get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD and ... she's still probably right, LOL.

    • I agree that we should know how to tinker or slightly modify files as well but I'd say pulling out a separate software with a huge learning curve is a step that's hard to get people to swallow.

      I think I really wanted to put emphasis on have to learn it, cause for things that feel simple to suddenly find it will take 30 hours of study and then several additional hours of fixing suddenly feels like a jump up in ask for making sure you can actually print a part successfully that's been posted in a 3D printer file site.

      I had experience with simple tools but they don't seem to exist much anymore and the tools in the slicer software seem to exist to say they do which brings me back to the question of if I was missing something or had to learn a separate software.

      But some of us aren't professional software engineers. And modifying something turns into a bigger project.

      TinkerCAD seems to be a popular answer and I hope simple enough cause I'd love to see stuff I helped design reality but not making money on it too means time needs to be spent keeping myself alive first and thus extended hobby space much further down.

  • Google's sketchup (last free version is from 2017, but can still be found) is easy tool and still has bunch of mantained add-on's.

    Even though I have FreeCAD installed (and I thinkered in it) I use SketchUp for all my prints.
    Plus in comparison to FreeCAD SketchUp has no learning curve (plus I learned some tricks from free tutorial videos Trimble uploads)

  • I find knoowingbthe basics helps.

    I use blender. Its not perfect for 3d modeling. But I knew it a little to start. Also easy to set up on linux.

    But honeatly learning its scale odds. (Defaults 1m to mm) boolean modifiers and 3d print tools. (Allow testing for real world models and extra faces.)

    Really is all i need to modify stls and make my own sruff.

  • Netfabb before Autodesk fucked it will fix a lot of hanging vectors, Sketchup is just way easier to use than any CAD software I've every used but may or may not be able to open files included with Thingiverse downloads, depending on what was used to make them.

    DM me if you need a copy of either. I've installed both on Linux in the past as well and have a link to some documentation on that.

  • @Krauerking my opinion is no. For many things you can find a model on line. Much of the challenge can be getting the printer to work as you wish, so modelling might not be first on the to do list.

  • I find that being able to sketch up things I need in CAD and then print them is both cool and really useful. It's the main reason I bought a printer in the first place. Thus far I've tried out FreeCAD, Solid Edge, and Blender. With any modeling package, you will have to dedicate time on a regular basis to really get used to them. FreeCAD is certainly nice for the fact it's free, just as it implies. I used it to design a few parts that were functional. It works, has some useful workbenches and add-ons. My problems were the software having bugs that caused models to break when trying to make changes, and available training info was often outdated. Siemens offers a free version of Solid Edge to makers, which is really nice, even with some of the advanced features turned off. It's a much more polished program with great training resources. You can only export designs as stl files, but that's fine for 3d printing. Solid Edge will slice and print, but I always import files into Orca and go from there. Blender looks really amazing for modeling, but I admit I haven't spent enough time learning it yet. You can use it to manipulate meshes, which is useful for customizing and fixing models. I've used it to Frankenstein together different models for custom prints I wanted. But yeah, while you don't have to learn to use modeling software to do prints, it opens up so many options for you to be creative. I think it's worth while.

  • Good old Thingiverse. You'll get a great education in now not to design things for 3D printing wading through that slurry pit.

    Yes, consider a 3D printer useless if you don't know how to use 3D modeling software.

70 comments