I’ve made a large number of custom prints, and all of them were created using TinkerCad. It’s an amazing toolkit, stupid easy to use but versatile. That is … until something needs a tiny adjustment somewhere. That’s when I feel it would’ve been neat to use parametric CAD instead.
I have spent many hours following Youtube tutorials for Onshape, Fusion, and FreeCAD. Tutorial shapes like a LEGO brick are fairly easy, although I admit that this kind of modeling is a sharp departure from the kid-friendly TinkerCad.
My problem is that I don’t want to make simple coasters or keychains, but complex shapes like this one. It’s a holder/mount for two different kinds of walkie-talkies that I use, and the blue part slides into a tray in my car’s dash where it sits nice and snug.
Question: How the hell do I even get started modeling something like this?? There’s not a single straight cuboid here. Everything is slightly wedge-shaped.
The way I do this in TinkerCad is that I build the hollow first: I made a 3d model of the walkie, a little oversized, set it be hollow, and drop it into the shape - that’s the red or orange shells you see.
I do feel like there is a chasm between mastering tinkerad and being able to do even fairly basic things in FreeCad.
Seems like a real window of opportunity for weekend makers that want to up their game but don’t want to go full on traditional cad software. I’m not aware of a decent software package that sits in that space.
MatterControl sits somewhere in between.
Works great for arsty models, though it can sometimes mess up the mesh. Still one of my most used modeling software next to FreeCAD
Neat. Will check this out.