Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.
Still missing minor advanced features of fusion360 but imo worlds better even if so
Looking back, it would have been more productive to develop proficiency in and give money/support to any underdog competitor.
The hard part is if you build real ip up in these things that you lose when you get rug pulled. Or have no way to backup. F360 let's you export more complicated formats. But they all let you make stls which are a pita to reverse int drawings but you can.
It took me 50 hours to learn solid works, my first tool so I could kinda make what I wanted. Inventor took 3 to get used to. F360 an hour. The cost goes down.
Pick one your friends are using and design things.
Try openscad if you're more of a mathematical mind. Try blender if your an artist. Those are different yet still you're making things.
If you mentioned what you wanted to make I can point you further. There's many options.
What you'd lose are your designs however. 3D designs don't convert well.
But currently there is no 3D CAD software that is good for mechanical design and has a good and free license for hobbyists.
If you have the money, and you're fine with windows, I would suggest alibre with the offline license as one of the few options available.
I've bitten the bullet and went with a mixture of freecad/openscad/cadquery/solvespace for my hobby designs. It's more work due to the limits, but zero regrets.
> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world
My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files.
I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends.
Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2]
I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in.
The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle.
[0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates."
[1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left.
[2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.
At the time (1980s), I'm not sure there were very many good headlamp options but either way, I wasn't in control of the portable light purchasing decisions.
However, the man who's job it was didn't skimp much. He was a small plane pilot, so I recall being warned not "to look into this flashlight[0]." It looked not much different than you're typical consumer flashlight, but if you picked it up, it was much thicker plastic, used 4 C batteries and no joke, it hurt your eyes to look into.
[0] The flashlight has a switch and a button on it, the button lets you flicker the light for emergency visual signalling (the kind that a pilot might need for the very specific situation of "need to flash morse-code through the windscreen at the ATC tower to get landing clearance because I was struck by lightning and my radios are all fried" -- so ... bright.
But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.
The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case).
So maybe when next time someone wanted to say "fuck Autodesk", send $5 to FreeCAD instead (https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php).
What about SolidWorks?
I’m an EE who only needs to use 2D CAD occasionally. Back in the early days I got myself a copy of AutoCAD LT (my company used AutoCAD so it made sense to learn the same tools that out draftsmen used). I developed strong muscle memory for the AutoCAD commands, and it’s not really worth my time and hassle to learn a new tool given how infrequently I need it. Some years back I stumbled on DraftSight which was free / low-cost and was a UI clone of AutoCAD. They eventually switched to a subscription model. I’m not a big fan of SASS, but when it’s not an exorbitant price, needed for my professional work, and the software generates industry standard files that I can use with other packages if I want to get off the SASS merry-go-round, I’m not strongly opposed, either.
I switched to Parallels because of some shenanigans a while back...
~~I know that LTT had such a license and made it a point to bring it up every time VMWare called them to turn it into a subscription.~~
I remembered wrong. :(
EDIT: Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113513
Years pass.. the thousands of amazing and efficient books are printed, but people now have more books than they know how to use. But the lock system is in more places. The book maker group now has bills to pay, and the interest in new books is less and less. But the lock people are making more money every month.
SO the fine book people decide that they must now build locks.
The structure of the firm dictates it’s future.
Industry is making things. Books, food, video games, computers, petrochemicals.
Business is getting money.
Business strangles industry to death all the time.
The only thing we can do about it is make things that can't possibly be monetized. This is relatively easy in software - but still hard. Linux succeeded, and nobody pays for Solaris. Git succeeded, and nobody pays for Bitkeeper. One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents, but the world will be better off.
But the people who make these things won't be rewarded, because they won't be doing business. Indeed, in many cases they'll go straight to prison.
The biggest trouble (after making a CAD software itself) is to keep it in line with a current regulations. I'm not familiar if A. even does that, but some regional alternatives are making money not only on the SW itself, but by providing services related to be in the compliance of regulations.
Not a professional CAD user myself, but as a hobbyist with an interest in this space I've never heard of the former case, so I'm curious.
This one, I should had frame it better.
> I've never heard of the former case
I don't think the CAD software itself is a point of a regulations, but there are definitely some standards and regs regarding how it should be done. A quick search yielded [0] which is a nice example of how it could be done by a hand, yet it would help immensely if the CAD software would aid and do the things by itself, saving both the time and man-hours.
[0] https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/design-and-construction/comp...
I do wonder who is liable if the software used to design a bridge outputs incorrect simulation results and the bridge collapses as a consequence. I suppose it's on the senior project engineer (or whoever ultimately signs off on the design) to verify the results somehow.
Edit: This article [0] talks about the "trust" placed in commercial and open-source CAD software by engineers and doesn't mention regulation/certification of the software itself, which seems to imply that there is none.