Although you still need windows, Rhino3D is amazing and has a perpetual license. It's way cheaper if you are studying or teaching. There is also sketchup which works through the browser but I don't know if that works on Linux.
Having tried similar things, I cannot stress enough how much you want to be printing molds like this in TPU unless you really really want your mold to be permanently embedded in the concrete
I'm quite happy with FreeCAD. It's not really intuitive but I'll gladly take that over any other program with those modern account/subscription/cloud bullshit "features".
I think the guide I did at !cad is still in pretty decent shape.
I actually settled on Alibre Design. Permanent license at half the cost of a year of OnShape for a slightly dated but very capable parametric modeler, and the free trial made Parametric modeling click for me in a way FreeCAD didn't. It comes with a renderer of a similar class, though I haven't tried that yet. Changing colors of parts has been enough for my needs.
FreeCAD has apparently fixed the topological naming issue, one of the big things that was keeping them so far behind the commercial suites. It's already in the weekly builds, along with several other enhancements pioneered in the Realthunder fork, including UI enhancements and a default Assembly workbench. Version 1 is going to come out in the late summer or early fall, I think. Ondsel is FreeCAD but they have some venture funding to pay developers to work on the main project and to bolt-on an optional paid PDM system (download from their GitHub and you don't have to sign up for anything). I had some crashing issues on both Windows and Linux when trying to import DXF files into either flavor, and as you say, there's still that learning curve, but I can get a part done in it now if I need to.
SolveSpace can do some nice things and will teach you good techniques.
I had the same issues as you with OnShape, particularly since their free licensing is very weird, and in the worst case it implies that while YOU must use your designs non-commercially, no one else is similarly bound. It's sloppy legal drafting, and that annoys the little black kernel of lawyerness still sunk down in my heart. Fusion has become the poster child for free feature erosion and price hikes.
BricsCAD Shape is a basically an AutoCAD clone warped and twisted to act like SketchUp, and it works on Linux. It's meant to be the tease to get people into their full-suite ecosystem, but I couldn't find any legal limitations on the free version.
Depending on what it is you're scanning, the people mentioning Blender may have a good point.
Shapr3D at $300/year might also be a good option.
Finally, for your particular workflow, Plasticity at $150 permanent license may hit the exact sweet spot. Definitely try their free trial. Some of the other programs I tried are also interesting.
Personally I love openSCAD, but it is probably really unintuitive to someone without programming experience and even then has it's own limitations.
FreeCAD is in a weird position ATM, it is actually really good! ...just not in the stable release... The Dev version is significantly more palatable, and they even went on a feature freeze to really push through with their major 1.0 release.
For now though Onsdel (Sort of a fork of FreeCAD packaged with Dev release and UI improvements) has worked really well for me thus far!
Is there a good tutorial or better yet, videos showing how to use ondsel? When I tried to use it, everything pointed at free car and the ui was too different.
I am not certain, I have used FreeCAD tutorials for Onsdel to great success.
I think what I do is just listen to the tool name they reference, and then just look where I assume it would be to find it, rather than trying to find tools in the same places as them
I like "Solvespace" myself. It's simpler than FreeCAD and works better with the way I think of things (more focus on 2D planes). I don't do the "scan and sketch" thing though so can't speak to that. Might be worth a try.
It looks like Fusion 360 runs fine on Linux these days, I don’t know how reliable that is in practice (I would expect not very much).
OnShape is a great option if the licensing terms are compatible with what you are doing. They used to have similar licensing terms as Fusion 360 where you could still get paid for your work with a free version (i.e. YouTube) but changed the terms to remove this loophole. Fusion still allows this with the Startup license but of course could change their mind at any time, then you’d be out of luck.
I dislike the lockdown of Fusion 360 but its mental model works with my own (I can’t “get” SolidWorks and never remember how to do anything). Speaking of SolidWorks, they added a reasonably-priced license for DIY/hobbyists, but it’s the same lockdown as Fusion 360 and still Windows only.
I’m in the same boat as you, just a hobbyist doing this for my own use, I have no interest in becoming an industrial engineer. For now I will keep using Fusion 360, and when that stops being an option I’ll move on to something else. I can whip out models for my prints easily enough and the 10 documents limit is just an annoyance, not a real limitation.
At the very least whatever you design in Fusion 360 or OnShape won’t be stuck in there, you can export it out via .step files. You lose design history (if applicable) but not the model itself.
I should have prefaced that I did not actually run this myself, but I did take a note of it, it looked promising. Sorry for the false hope!
I would expect it to work after a lot of fussing about, and then break at the slightest update. Easier to run it in a VM (which is also not easy in order to get GPU acceleration without dedicating a card to it - I never managed to get Intel GVT-g nor GVT-d to work reliably).
Yup. At this point, "locally installed, reliable, parametric modeling on Linux" = "FreeCAD, including Ondsel, and SolveSpace". That's it. Well, there's code-to-CAD as well, which obviously retains parametric history, but goes about it very differently than a design tree.
For non-parametric modeling, BricsCAD and Plasticity enter the discussion. For parametric on the web, OnShape works very well but I hate their licensing scheme and the huge doughnut hole in their pricing model.
I was quite amazed reading NopHead’s blog a while back because he uses OpenSCAD exclusively, even managing to design an entire printer and its upgrades in there. I didn’t think any sane person could do this.
I could never get his repo to work, I've resigned to using fusion in a VM for now while I wait for progress in freecad or the parametric cad plugins for blender to mature.
I really hope that FreeCAD will get better with time, and the Blender story will be the same for FreeCAD. Just a few years back, Blender was really bad compared with Maya, now Autodesk lost a huge market because Blender is powerful enough for professional work, probably even better than Maya
I'm really hoping FreeCAD gets the Blender treatment. ONDSEL is already pushing it pretty far, but once extensibility is more robust and the new user experience improved, I believe that'll be the tipping point.
Oh man "extensibility" in FreeCAD. The documentation is non-existent, is the main problem. It's just about impossible to understand how anything works, it's like trying to figure out how to run a battleship by turning cranks and seeing what they do.
My point exactly. If FreeCAD refines that framework and documents it well, community plugin support could drive many new features and quality of life improvements into the main branch.
You could try Ondsel, the trimmed UI makes it easier to use than Freecad in my opinion, the learning curve is still steep tho. No account needed if you get it on GitHub: https://github.com/Ondsel-Development/FreeCAD/releases
You could also take a look at Plasticity, seems very intuitive to use and should work well with your clicky workflow, it's a one time payment and has a Linux version. I don't have any personal experience with it, but there is a trial version so you can try it before investing any money. https://www.plasticity.xyz
Plasticity is a pretty cool application that's growing pretty quickly and offers perpetual licenses, so you retain access to the program once your maintenance period expires. I think it has a ton of potential to become very useful for the 3d printing space that doesn't necessarily require the full power of a pure CAD application but needs more than something purely art-focused like 3d modeling software.
One of the greatest things is the dev takes a lot of input from the community when deciding what features are added. There's a whole website for suggesting and voting on features to be added and several of them have already been put into development and implemented already. And on top of all that it's, comparatively, affordable. I'm still learning it so I don't know the full limitations of it's usefulness for 3d printing but to me it seems very capable.
I don't think onshape has the market position to rug-pull their free tier. They need as many people using it as possible to act as a counterbalance to fusion, and the server costs are really not that high for a web app that does the vast majority of processing on the client side.
I'm in the same boat! I got tired of the constant enshittification of Fusion360 and started learning FreeCAD. And wow! it's way less intuitive.
But I think I'll push through, as I don't want anything but open-source for this. The reason being that I don't want the same thing to happen again: I spend an unholy amount of time learning how to use a CAD software, and then it becomes the hottest steaming pile of corporate shit possible and I don't want to use it anymore. That's why I haven't even started looking at OnShape.
With open-source the biggest risk is that the same thing might happen if the project gets abandoned, but it doesn't seem to be the case for FreeCAD (at least in the foreseeable future).
In any case, I'm interested in hearing what others have to say :)
I only use pretty basic modelling, and have no interest in advanced CAD featueres, I've tried both the link branch and ondsel, and I honesty think they're about the same level as regular freecad. None of them are even near as intuitive to use as for example onshape, they're actually a bit of a chore to use IME.
You only need an account if you want access their cloud storage and sharing management. You can get a tiny free account if you want. I signed up for the freebie since I sometimes work between 2 computers on the same project. But if you only use one computer, it's not going to get you anything extra.
You can add Ondsel Lens to your regular install simply by installing it through the add-on manager if you want.
I think each person has to recognize that there is a time/energy cost to get out of enshittification hell, and then decide how much they're willing to pay. If the answer for you is at least "an afternoon of video tutorials", then Freecad will be fine for you. It's a complicated tool that you need some help learning; that's ok. It won't become your new hobby.
If you don't want to pay that cost, that's understandable. If you feel mad that there is a cost at all, that's ok too. That's how enshittification works, and it sucks. As I said, each person will have to decide whether and how much they're willing to pay to get out of it.
Anyway, the MangoJelly tutorials in YouTube are really excellent, and will have you up and running in a few hours at most. (My CAD needs are also very basic, and I was done after the first two parts, 30 min each.) For following along, I would recommend just using the main version, so that it matches his tutorial exactly, and do the steps as he shows you. It feels dumb, but it's such a fast way to learn. You can decide later if you want to switch to one of the other branches, depending on what features you care about or what annoys you most.
The feature freeze is on and they have a UI overhaul and a Topological Naming Problem fix.
I am using the 0.22 dev version with the fix and oh boy it makes a huge difference. Obviously deleting a face where there was a feature attached to results in an error still. It makes it viable to use the mainline instead of realthunder fork.
I found Freecad has become fairly intuitive if you already have traditional parametric cad experience, there's definitely a few quirks but generally super easy to adapt to if you come from solidworks, inventor and the like, trying to convince my dad to give it a try as he's been getting back into design since retiring and he's been paying for a solid works license. Personally use ondsel but mainline freecad is totally useable.
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