Eh, I think the weakspot in any 3d printing will be the software. As a hobby engineer, I use Solidworks which is several thousand dollars (luckily already on some of my employer's computers so they foot the bill).
But at home, I tried FreeCad, Cubify Invent, and several other free or cheap options and I find them invariably terrible, at least as far my limited experience can discern. FreeCad in particular, asides from UI nonintuitive issues and heaps of bugs (various cuts and operations simply disappearing f
Wow! It is incredibly refreshing to see a new opportunity for a piece of commercial PC software that is expected to cost more than $2. It must be the first time in about 10 years.
Perhaps one of the established players will decide to bow out of the high-end, and target 3d printing. Or, make a new cut-rate home/small business version, ala Photoshop Elements.
On the open-source side we'll have to see if things turn out more like Gimp or Blender (usable options), or more like the video editing situation
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Wednesday October 29, 2014 @06:07PM (#48265357)
I'd like to see an UnrealEd-style interface for one of these 3D modeling programs.
I've tried Maya, AutoCAD, and a couple of others, and I've not found a more intuitive interface than UnrealEd.
Not the visual part, that's just a standard top/side/front/render quad. I'm talking about the mouse control. Click to drag. Right-click to pan/roll. Chord-click to zoom. It was nearly as intuitive as, well, playing an FPS.
That, and the simplicity of brushes, but without the incomplete feature-set of UEd. Basically, create geometry with brushes, then "flatten" to the properly normalized triangle geometry needed for most 3D stuff. Or, hell, acute CSG might be a perfectly good way of representing things that can be made with a 3D printer. The BSP partitioner could easily "chunk" a complex model into acute CSG partitions for printing.
Truespace is a very acessible 3D program. I loved the simplicity of its binary object tools. You might not make the most efficient model in TS, but its solid.
Where will decent software come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh, I think the weakspot in any 3d printing will be the software. As a hobby engineer, I use Solidworks which is several thousand dollars (luckily already on some of my employer's computers so they foot the bill).
But at home, I tried FreeCad, Cubify Invent, and several other free or cheap options and I find them invariably terrible, at least as far my limited experience can discern. FreeCad in particular, asides from UI nonintuitive issues and heaps of bugs (various cuts and operations simply disappearing f
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps one of the established players will decide to bow out of the high-end, and target 3d printing. Or, make a new cut-rate home/small business version, ala Photoshop Elements.
On the open-source side we'll have to see if things turn out more like Gimp or Blender (usable options), or more like the video editing situation
Re:Where will decent software come from? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to see an UnrealEd-style interface for one of these 3D modeling programs.
I've tried Maya, AutoCAD, and a couple of others, and I've not found a more intuitive interface than UnrealEd.
Not the visual part, that's just a standard top/side/front/render quad. I'm talking about the mouse control. Click to drag. Right-click to pan/roll. Chord-click to zoom. It was nearly as intuitive as, well, playing an FPS.
That, and the simplicity of brushes, but without the incomplete feature-set of UEd. Basically, create geometry with brushes, then "flatten" to the properly normalized triangle geometry needed for most 3D stuff. Or, hell, acute CSG might be a perfectly good way of representing things that can be made with a 3D printer. The BSP partitioner could easily "chunk" a complex model into acute CSG partitions for printing.
This could be totally Epic (pun intended).
Re: (Score:2)
try Caligari trueSpace 3D (Score:2)
Caligari trueSpace 3D which as a long history is really nice.
Re: (Score:2)
Truespace is a very acessible 3D program. I loved the simplicity of its binary object tools. You might not make the most efficient model in TS, but its solid.