Greetings to all. I just ordered my 3D printer so im soooo excited.

3D Printing
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1

Greetings to all. I just ordered my 3D printer so im soooo excited. I wanted to ask what program is the best for building objects to be printed.

2

At the moment I’d say start with OpenSCAD for mechanical designs, and ArtOfIllusion for doing organicy stuff. Use Meshlab to sort out your meshes if they’re broke. Programs to look at later are FreeCAD and Blender, with netfab for fixing up meshes.

3

Have a look at:

http://shapesmith.net/
and

web-based app

http://www.implicitcad.org/
OpenSCAD based

4

+1 for OpenSCAD, absolutely love it. One of the reasons it is so good for 3D printing is that it defines everything so precisely. This is the video that turned me onto OpenSCAD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmKnvEcPTk8

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@Miguel_Sanchez s i did,i like it

6

Awesome thanks. Are these better than AutoCAD?

7

@tom_tom I wouldn’t know, I avoid proprietary software wherever possible. If you can do accurate 3D models and export to STL then it should work.

8

Another interesting software for 3D design is Google Sketch Up

9

Yeah, but Google flogged Sketchup off and it never actually became multi-platform. All the options mentioned are.

10

I use Sketch Up in OSX, Windows and Linux (wine) but I find OpenSCAD more productive.

11

I,ll have to open up the OpenSCAD. It seems to be popular.

12

When you get down to it, it’s a bit like playing with blocks as a kid!