1 Topic by driggers (edited by driggers 2013-05-08 20:10:06)

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Topic: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

Life called me away from printing, and now I'm BACK!  And tinkercad is gone, :'(.  That's just as well, because I really need something more powerful.

Should I dive into Sketchup, Wings3D, or something else?

If you are familiar with the advantages of one or the other, please post below.  I'm concerned about:
- Sketchup's tendency to make things non-manifold
- importing and exporting STLs
- designing things quickly
- getting help from a 3D printing community that uses the software
- not learning more than one full featured modelling software

I understand my toolchain will involve something like wings/skp, meshlab/netfabb, slic3r/skein, pronterface/repet, solidoodle?

I remember spending a whole weekend learning Blender, and I forgot everything after drawing one glorified box with such weird shading that I had to explain to people what it was.  But maybe I should take another crack at it...

Thoughts?

update:  I have asked a similar question in the Wings3D forum, and some of you might be interested in the answers there: http://www.wings3d.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=312

SD2 Sanguinololu 1.3a atmega1284p, wood platform, lawsy's carriages, braided fishing line, pallet wood overhead spool mount, carboard/magnet enclosure, glass bed, E3D v6, bed levelling knobs, extended z-stop, 25A DC-DC SSR for bed heater, everything fixed to the SD2 frame, marlin firmware with some adjustments and extra failsafes enabled.  I'll never give up on you, little printer that could(n't)!

2 Reply by Chimeara

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

Blender is great and free, but learning curve is big, with many features you will not need for 3d printing. Sketchup is good because it is simple, but also bad because it is simple. Wings is somewhat half way between the two, but i've never used it for 3d printing.

3 Reply by lawsy

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

I use Sketchup and have added a lot of plugins to increase the functionality. The main problem is that it crashes A LOT.

The other problem is that all of a sudden shapes that are meant to be manifold are giving errors in Slic3r. I suspect this might be a problem with slic3r though, 0.99 seems a bit buggy.

I've recently gotten a copy of Autodesk Inventor Professional so looking forward to using that. It seems a lot like Solidworks which I was previously trained in.

lawsy's Website

4 Reply by tick72 (edited by tick72 2013-05-20 15:32:53)

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

Tinkercad is back.

I use sketchup and trying to learn blender but i have little time to sit and play around with it so i have just been sticking to sketchup.

5 Reply by neoblood3d

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

I can help with Blender3d if you guys are interested.  I've got about a decade of Blender3d experience.  I can tell you with some certainty that it can scale to whatever size job you want if you take a couple weekends to tinker with it.  There are a lot of videos that have streamlined the process of learning Blender.  My favorites are the old GreyWolf Blender3d tutorials.  The versions of Blender are different of course but all the core techniques are explained.

6 Reply by ronsii

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

I didn't think blender was all that much of a learning curve... it can look a little intimidating at first but once you get into it it is pretty easy it can get just as complicated as you want it to be or if you just want simple stuff it can stay simple... like neoblood says it can scale to whatever job you want smile

7 Reply by Kerry

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

I have had good luck with Alibre (name change to Geomagic) and Creo Elements (free version) you get a lot of function out of Creo for a freeware application.  I'm new to 3d printing but have been CNC milling and turning for some time now, the tool chain is a bit different but it all starts with a model and an export to an stl file.

8 Reply by cod3r

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Re: Sketchup or Wings3D or Blender?

I'm total newbie to CAD programs as well and I went with Geomagic as well.  If you buy "this month" you get for free 15 hours of video tutorials.

Cubify invent is mostly the same and some guy made some great tutorials on youtube with it.  I used those to learn geomagic.  It's real easy to get up and going IMO..