grogking wrote:Thanks for clarifying for me Chris
You mentioned you use solidworks, as a fellow 3d printing guy, how difficult is solidworks to learn for designing 3d prints? Do you have any tutorials you could recommend?
For me Solidworks is super super easy. At this point it's almost like an extension of my hands. That being said, I have about 8 years of experience using it. Given that though, I was 12 when I learned so it must be pretty easy to use haha. Engineering firms mainly use it, I'm not sure if it's "for" the average consumer. I have access to it because people in my family are engineers and I'm currently an engineering student so I have the student version. However, Autodesk/fusion 360 is very similar to solidworks and it's much cheaper. I believe more people use that.
To answer your question more directly though, I find it very easy to use for designing for 3D printers. It's less what you're using to model the shapes and more keeping in mind how the printer is going to print it (support materials and all that stuff) But since you already have experience with printers, you should be fairly familiar with what types of geometries will be challenging or impossible for a 3D printer to make. That part definitely goes a long way when it comes do designing for parts that need to be printed.
Regarding the tutorial aspect, I'm self taught. The only times I've really looked at tutorials is if I need to do surfacing (complex surfaces). But whenever I do need a tutorial, I go to this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SolidworksTutorials Their videos are fairly easy to follow.
Most of what you do in solidworks is extruding. The modeling itself isn't hard, the hard part comes in when you're trying to imagine what the 3D shape is that you want to model looks like so you can model it.
Cheers!