3-D Design Tools

There are lots of tools out there for designing 3-D objects for printing. The question is which one should I use to design the object I want to print. In the spirit of the RepRap open source approach the first tool that I tried was Blender. 


Blender


This tool is really designed for people interested in developing 3-D animations for video games or movies. It is incredibly powerful and has the worlds most confusing user interface, however I did spend about 4-weeks learning the interface but once you know all the short-cut keys it is very quick to drive the interface.


I did find this incredibly useful guide on how to user Blender for designing engineering drawings. You can download it here.

However, after evaluating the tool for a month I just didn't find Blender lent itself to designing engineering drawings.


Alibre


Alibre is a commercial 3-D CAD tool that costs several thousands of Dollars. However, they have a personal edition for hobbyists that costs $99. You can also download a full trial version for one-month for free, the only cost is regular phone calls from their sales force encouraging you to buy.


That said Alibre is a very intuitive interface, especially if you have any 2-D drawing experience. You start out by drawing 2-D views of the object, then stretch it into a 3-D object. Unlike Blender I was up and running with this tool in one evening designing quite complex objects. There are also  numerous video tutorials available for free on their site.


CoCreate


CoCreate (now called Creo) is another commercial 3-D CAD package, but they have personal edition which is available for free. It's tough to find on their site, but once you find it you have to fill in your personal details and then you can download the personal edition. 


It is very similar to Alibre in its approach and also quite intuitive. I was also up and running with this package in an evening.


My Choice


In the end I decided to pick Alibre, although it cost me $99 it had some nice features that I liked. Particularly the ability to go back to any point in a design and make a change (e.g. modify a distance or hole size) and then have it ripple through the design. These changes could be made in the 3-D image or in the 2-D drawings or in the assembly as you are putting multiple parts together.


The downside with both Alibre and CoCreate is that the STL they create is ASCII based, and the Mendel tools and RepSnapper both expect STL in Binary format. To fix that I wrote a short Python script to convert ASCII STL files to Binary STL files. I'll post the file in a separate post.