Best free CAD for 3D printing?

Been researching best free CAD online and the YouTubes. I could just download and try 'em out but to limit the curve I'm looking for recommendations for 3D printing specifically. 

Plan is to print a PLA pattern for sand casting aluminum. Will start casting flat, as in plaques, license plates etc. Import a logo from companies, teams, vehicle makes etc. plus create text and images. All images and text will need draft added for clean removal from the sand. 

Machine type parts will come later.

There are the Top 5-10 lists of free CAD online, several look promising. 

Any recommendations from the hive?

TIA

I think there's a promo on their site still, for a 40 buck license for Solidworks. I suspect that will be cheaper than free cad ware, but I only stayed in a holiday inn once...

I'm working on learning Fusion 360, whose startup license is free up to some annual sales figure I'm not going to hit for a while, if at all. Er, last I checked, and my license seemed to be working last time I had a stab a few weeks ago.

Tinkercad.com pretty easy to grasp for a total beginner. Fusion 360 is more full featured, but i believe not everything is free anymore.

Jay_W said:

I think there's a promo on their site still, for a 40 buck license for Solidworks. I suspect that will be cheaper than free cad ware, but I only stayed in a holiday inn once...

Damn.  I didn't realize SW was so cheap.  I was thinking they were upwards of $150 for a license.  Good news when my student subscription finally runs out. (I keep eking by because I take an online class maybe once a year)

SW is definitely one of the more powerful ones, but it takes some hard work to get to the more organic shapes in it  For plaques and such it will do well, for mechanical parts it will do great, but if you want to do a sculpture other products might be better.  At least in my experience

Solidworks is 4k for a license.  I don't know what you're getting for for 40, but it's probably not a license. 

Open SCAD is an interesting option as you can download scripts for doing things, like mold making or curve rendering.

Tinkercad is really basic, until you get into some more advanced things like the extrusion tool, then it gets to be a real pain in the ass.

Sketchup I've never been very good with so I don't use it.

Pretty sure you can still get a free student license for Fusion.

On top of all of those I do have a copy of auto cad 2018. So so very different from 2005 which I used in college that I can't really use it anymore, but I might still have the license on a hard drive somewhere if you want to give it a whirl. 

I'm using Fusion 360. Free for students and startups under $100k annual income. 

Just about any program will work, as long as it can produce STL files.

I use Fusion360.  You can learn it too off my tutorials here: https://www.gwellwood.com/subjects/drafting/fusion360-level-1/

I teach off these tutorials at the highschool level.

New 3D printer owner here, a friend recommended TinkerCAD for simple stuff to get me going.  But I'm following this thread for future ideas.

I use Creo at my current day job and I've been an Autodesk Inventor user since shortly after it came out and I've used SolidWorks some so I'm pretty comfortable with 3D CAD software.  I found Fusion 360 to be pretty powerful and the concepts and tools felt familiar to me.  I think it's an excellent too for 3D printing and in the unlikely event that you outgrow it you can either step up to the paid version or use the skills you learned to transition to any of the big name programs.

The best CAD is the one you already know :)

IMO, Fusion 360 seems to be the best option for hobbyists.  Seems like the recent changes restrict things a bit, but still useable for smaller projects.

Like mentioned above, almost anything will export .STL.

FWIW, When I look at Fusion 360s site I see .step as an option:

Will we get to the point where we can "Talk" to our CAD program like Alexa ?

" draw me a 3 by 4 inch box with the top side open.......blah blah blah"

or just a chip in my brain !

I've mentioned on more than one occasion that you can scoop up an academic license of Solidworks for free if you have an EAA membership which is $40 a year.

Although not free, I really like Alibre Atom 3D. I find it a good compromise between price, ease of use and functionality. You can try it for free for 30 days to see if you like it.

I'm not a total NFG, was chasing an AutoCAD associate degree at community college in the late 90's. Got halfway through and took a semester off because I was passing up way too much OT $. I never went back, so might as well be a noob with the current crop of CAD programs.

I'll bag a few hours/ night on YouTube tutorials for CAD programs till I burnout. 

So far I think...

Tinkercad for beginning. I could play w/ simple stuff as I acclimate to my new printer, gotta learn the ins n outs of that machine as well. Probably the best starting point.

FreeCad was recommended by a guy on the foundry forum. From many YT tutorials it looks promising. Can't call it middle of the road but probably on a par w/ some on my list. It's open source so it will always be free. How it will be updated and supported in the future is anyones guess. This could be my go to but it's early yet. Any opinions on this CAD? There are plenty more tutorials to look at.

I have to wonder though if people actually chose a CAD program for specific needs or it's what they learned on and had access to. 

Fusion 360 would be top of the ladder. Would be great for machine type parts down the road and definitely on the list. Free for 'hobbyist' makes me wonder how long that will last tho. 

Blender is more artistic based. Interesting but not necessary right now. Could be good for 3D printing but casting not as much unless lost PLA. I'm not on that level yet. Could also be good for creating logos. 

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll continue with tutorials. Got some PLA and bed glue today. Time to start playing with the new machine. 

CAD decisions still to be made, so keep telling me more.

Fusion 360 is probably the best package you can get for free. It's crazy powerful for the experienced user but it's not hard to pick up the basics. If you move on to solidworks or similar later on, it won't be that big of a leap because the interfaces are fairly similar. 

SkinnyG (Forum Supporter) said:

Just about any program will work, as long as it can produce STL files.

I use Fusion360.  You can learn it too off my tutorials here: https://www.gwellwood.com/subjects/drafting/fusion360-level-1/

I teach off these tutorials at the highschool level.

Very cool, thanks for sharing!  I use Solidworks 2016 because it's what I know, but it would be nice to learn Fusion 360 since it seems to be the gold standard for 3D printing at the moment.

I have successfully used Sketchup, but my project was quite modest.  In general, I suck at learning graphics software (give me a command line interface!)  but I found Sketchup to be manageable.

Students seem to  create things in Sketchup that just print drunk.  I'm not sure what it is they are doing, but the collection of pushed and pulled and attached shapes create voids that you can't see, but that the printer finds.

Once I got the kids using Fusion, it make Sketchup look like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a 9-pack of Crayolas.

1988RedT2 said:

I have successfully used Sketchup, but my project was quite modest.  In general, I suck at learning graphics software (give me a command line interface!)  but I found Sketchup to be manageable.

On a related note, one thing I love about Rhino is that it still has the Autocad style command interface.  I find this infinitely better than the icon-style interface of most other CAD software.  No need to worry about how the ribbon bar is arranged, your quick access icons, etc.  Just start typing a command.

I will say it does make me wish I had a 3rd hand, because unlike in autocad, in Rhino I am usually using a spaceball as well, so I have to keep switching my left hand between the two.  I don't think it will be long before cad voice-commands are a thing.

On an even less related note, one thing I always try and get people to do is learn how to use a spaceball/3d mouse as soon as they can.  It makes all movement inputs universal across all cad software, because zoom,pan, and rotate mouse+kb controls have somehow not been standardized yet and that makes me think they never will be.