3D Modeling Tools and video tutorials

Here's a series of short introduction to the main strategies for 3d geometric modeling. Most of them are open source / freeware.

Fusion 360

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Fusion 360 (works cloud based) http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview Free as educational software.

TinkerCAD

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TinkerCAD (online - no download) http://www.tinkercad.com/

TinkerCAD Tutorial Pages 96-110 (PDF) "Chapter 8: Designing for the MakerBot", Getting Started with MakerBot

CAD: QCAD + Draftsight

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Download QCAD https://qcad.org/en/

Youtube Link

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Mesh: Blender

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Download BLENDER https://www.blender.org/

Youtube Link

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Solid+Parametric: FreeCAD

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Download FreeCad https://www.freecadweb.org/

Youtube Link

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NURBS: Rhinoceros 3D

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Download Rhino https://www.rhino3d.com/

Youtube Link

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SketchUp

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Download Google SketchUp http://sketchup.google.com/

Google SketchUp Tutorial Pages 110-117 (PDF) "Chapter 8: Designing for the MakerBot", Getting Started with MakerBot

OpenSCAD

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Download OpenSCAD http://www.openscad.org/ OpenSCAD Modeling Tutorial Read "Parametric Modeling with Solid Geometries", Getting Started with MakerBot, Chapter 8: Desinging for the MakerBot, pages 193-204 OpenSCAD DXF Extrusion & Exporting from Inkscape DXF Extrusion can be tricky. This is completely optional. Read "Parametric Modeling with Solid Geometries", Getting Started with MakerBot, Chapter 8: Desinging for the MakerBot, pages 204-212

Autodesk 123D Design

This program has been deprecated for FUSION 360

Download Autodesk 123D Design http://www.123dapp.com/design

123D Make Tutorial Pages 110-117 (PDF) "Chapter 8: Designing for the MakerBot", Getting Started with MakerBot

3D Tin

Bitmap / Pixelmap / Raster Graphics

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3D Tin (online - no download)

http://www.3dtin.com/

3D Tin Tutorial Pages 90-95 (PDF), "Chapter 8: Designing for the MakerBot", Getting Started with MakerBot

Data workflow among these softwares

Youtube Link

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Note

There are several places in the text where the command line code could not fit on one line. When you see something like this in the text:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/Inkscape-OpenSCAD-DXF-Export/* \ /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/

You should ignore the "\" at the end of the first line and paste the first line in, followed by a space. Then pase the second line of code.

For example - this code:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/Inkscape-OpenSCAD-DXF-Export/* \ /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/

Should look like this when you paste it into the terminal:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/Inkscape-OpenSCAD-DXF-Export/* /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/

Original tutorial by:

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License