Top 3 free 3d design software 2021

Hey folks, TechNibbers here. Today we are looking at the top three free software for designing 3D prints. We're going to be taking a look at Blender, Fusion 360, and Tinkercad. Now Tinkercad is an online app. It is free. You will have to register for this one though. We're going to jump right into it, compare some of the pros and cons right now on the TechNibbers channel. Hey folks, TechNibbers here. If you haven't already, make sure you hit that subscribe button, but stick around because today we're going to be talking about some pretty interesting stuff I don't think you're going to want to miss. So right off the bat, we're going to start with Tinkercad here. Now all of these softwares are free. This one is actually a online app and all you have to do is go to Tinkercad.com and then you can register and log in and you will see a menu somewhat like this. You shouldn't have any designs because you haven't made anything yet, but it is fairly simple to get going and easy to use. So let's go ahead and we'll click create new design and we will just whip something up real quickly here. The nice thing about Tinkercad is they have these primitives here that make it really, really easy to manipulate and kind of do what you want to do. So let's start with taking in a simple box here. Now I have all my information on this box right here. I can change the perimeters by entering into one of the corners here. So by clicking on this, it'll tell me my length and width. I can highlight that and I can change this to be, uh, let's say 25. It helps if I use the numpad or the numbers instead of the numpad. There we go, 25. Enter. You can see it expand. We can do the same here. Let's do 100 here and remember this is in millimeters. So then you can just click and drag it around. What I'm going to do is grab this top one here. You can see it's giving me the height dimension. We're going to take that down to three millimeters and we'll just make a fancy little nameplate here. So the next step in this process is going to be a fairly simple one. Let's go ahead and take and add some text. So super simple. You edit the text by entering it right here. I don't know why it didn't want to work there for a second. Tinkercad is pretty simple. So now it is too big. So let's go ahead. That's the height and oh, we need to grab it this way. There we go. So we'll make this match. We'll make it less so we can just type a smaller number than our width. It'll fit it in there and just drag it right over here. Now you'll notice that right now it is in the negative. It's grayed out. We can fix that by clicking solid again and we can go ahead and change the color just so you can see a little bit better. Then what I want to do is change the height to five and there we go. We have a nice little nameplate. So what if I wanted to, I can combine these pieces. I can select one and then shift select the other and then I can hit this button and it will group them together or I can take and make the logo a hole instead of solid and then I can simply group those two and now it takes and it'll boolean. It'll subtract that from out of there. So I liked it better the other way. So we'll control z. We'll make that work. We will reselect it and make it solid. We'll make it white. Selected the wrong part. Solid red. That's good. Okay. And then let's try that subtraction trick one more time. We can take this guy and go like this and now a hundred millimeters is pretty wide for a keychain but we can go ahead and pop this hole in here. You need to select this, make it be a hole, select them both and then group them together and you want it to be a hole. So now that part's solid. This part went to a hole. So solid again and there we have it. We have a name tag. You can make this into a keychain and I know this is super, super simple. This is probably the most primitive way to make a model. There is a ton of stuff you can do by altering these primitives and you can even import models and edit those as well. But for the beginner, this is probably the best place to start with a CAD program to get used to the techniques of it and kind of see exactly what you're doing. It works very, very well. It doesn't eat a lot of memory and it works right in the browser. So the next software we're going to take a look at today is going to be Blender. Now Blender is great for organic modeling and sculpting and things like that. I'm going to go ahead. I'm not going to need this camera or this light. So you can go in here with Blender. Blender is free to download and I can go to file new and I can either go to general which is what you see here or I can go to sculpting. And the sculpting mode is one of the big perks of Blender it does work better with a tablet and pen than with the mouse but it does work pretty well with the mouse and you can kind of just draw on here and build a more organic looking model than you would get from a CAD program. There are a lot of different options for stuff you can do here to manipulate it and it pretty much works just like clay so it's a lot like sculpting. It's great for making models of miniatures things like that. However if I were going to make a piece say a part for my printer in fact let's go ahead we'll go to new general don't save get rid of the camera here and the light again and if we take this and if I hit tab or I select this here I can go into edit mode and Blender is a little quicker when it comes to editing. I don't have my dimensions shown right here so I will have to scale it in the slicer but I can basically do the same model super quick so let's do this let's boom and add go back to object mode and then add text and we can manipulate this item let's take it let's move it over here go to our top view and we're going to rotate and just kind of drag okay so now I have the text and it's in object mode I can select the text object and move it around but in order to change the text I have to go into edit mode just like I did with my other objects so let's select the text edit mode technivorous there we go and now we have basically just our text but it's got no depth to it so let's go back to object mode and then if we go here and add a modifier we can solidify this and then move it down in there and I can either join it it'll export both of these together as one model as it is or I can take and I have a special tool hooked on here which apparent oh control shift b and then I can go to union or I can do difference and that will add or subtract that piece to cut the name out or whatever this case we'll do union and we will shift a mesh cylinder scale down drop it into the piece and sd okay the nice thing about blender is it has a lot of keyboard hotkeys so it's really easy to work with so if I hit b backwards so what it takes away depends on which item you select first so sometimes I get it backwards that'll do so there we have a name tag in blender so not too shabby so let's compare that to our other version now here I didn't mention that you can change the text you change the font there are a couple in here blender has a few more so if I select the text object again and I need to go to edit mode there are settings in here for specific here we go and you can see all of the text settings that you can change there is font you can load your own font add your own font all of that so pretty simple I use blender mostly for the organic modeling if I'm going to do a piece like this where it's pretty much just cad design I'm going to go ahead and use fusion 360 now fusion 360 is free but you have to get a student license it is worth it to pay for the full version you get a lot of extras and a lot of this is done online as well now fusion will work if you're offline but all your models are going to be stored on their server so you're not going to have access to a lot of them and things like that unless you export them to your computer so let's go ahead and we'll start a new design we will do the same thing in fusion fusion works on sketches so what we'll do is we'll grab the bottom plane here and they have different perimeters we can take we're going to take a rectangle that grows from the center the nice thing about this is I can just do my exact perimeters as I'm building the square here so this will be exactly the same dimensions as the one from Tinkercad and that's the thing about CAD is it's a lot more precise there are ways to set your dimensions in blender I get into that in another blender video and in fact I will be doing separate videos on each of these softwares and I will link to those as we're going over these so you might see cards popping up if you want to know more about a certain software we're using go ahead and click on that and check it out so now I have my plank let's go ahead and grab this I'm going to sketch right on this surface and I want to create a text so let's do technicris okay so this one has fonts built right in it will grab all the fonts right off your computer so there's no importing so this one we can do in my funky font here we'll change the height to be a little bit lower so it fits and okay so take this and modify finish sketch so now I can grab this whole word and extrude there we have it and I can go ahead and do one more sketch let's grab a circle this is a little bit easier than the adding and subtracting sometimes so we'll take this we'll pop that in there and we can while extruding which is this button right here we can either go up and extrude pillar or we can go down through the model now if we wanted to start at this plane and add to the back of the model we could change this to join we could also change this to new component or new body which will do the same thing but it will make them two separate pieces so as you can see up here right now there's only one body if I hit okay I have two bodies and I can grab this and manipulate it that's not what we want to do though do want to put a hole there so let's go ahead and take that down okay and we have our model so in this case I would take and export this into an STL and the same with blender if you're using Tinkercad it's automatically going to go to STL so you have obj gltf and STL STL is the one you want the other nice thing about Tinkercad is if you use a laser engraver you can do that with this piece right here so right now it's just going to export what is the name there because that is the selected shape so I would have to select everything and click export everything or group them together and then export them you and for blender you will go to file export STL and let's go ahead and export these out we will print a copy of each of them so we can take a look and compare let's get new folder CAD 2021 enter let's go in there and this will be blender STL and this will be STL that's going to put that right in my download file so let's see CAD 2021 drag this over here I was gonna get funky names we're gonna rename this tinker and lastly we'll export this guy to do that you go to file you have to save this file and because I don't have the paid version I only have a certain number of editable documents which is 10 and I'm at the max right now so all you have to do is go in here and make one of those read only and you can always change it back later once you do that I can now hit save you do have to save it before you can export it so let's save and then of course the worst part about fusion 360 is the time it takes to actually export the STL so STL go down to the bottom and we're going to change the name to fusion export now this obviously is going to take a little while shouldn't be too bad we will go ahead and throw these on the printers and compare them the next time you see me we will have all three models in front of us and we will do some comparison tests all right and here we have all three models ready to go or slice them up we'll get the printer going I did reduce the size in order to reduce the time they should be done in about 40 minutes and we will check them out all right and here we have our three finished models I did scale them down to save some time so this is our fusion 360 model this one right here is our blender model and this is our tinkercad model all of them came out all right they're pretty decent they're pretty legible and decent models all I could easily add some keychain and make these guys dangle they're about the right size for that let's go ahead and remove them from the build plate here just get under there real quick with a razor and we'll get a little bit better look at these guys not much of a difference in what the capabilities are like I said blender is a lot better at doing organic models so if you want to do like a sculpture of a living creature you're going to do a lot better with that fusion 360 is great for technical designs although you can see in scaling this down I did lose a little bit of clarity there and the e is a little bit over extruded but that is a scale problem you can see it didn't have the same effect on the blender model this one came out pretty nice and so did the tinkercad model to scale this is actually probably the best of them in my opinion so let's see we'll pile these right in here get a nice comparative shot and you can decide for yourself which method you would like to use that's going to be it for this video guys don't forget to leave a like down below and hit that subscribe button we have lots more videos like this coming at you as well as individual videos on each of these softwares and how to use them to make models for your 3d printer stick around guys I got another youtube recommended video for you right here and if you haven't already subscribe subscribe subscribe make sure that you smash that like button we'll see you in the next one technivers out