I was inspired by this: https://www.printables.com/model/86396-self-defense-cat but wanted to make it more robust, so I traced the shape and made my own model in pirated Solidworks. One side looks better than the other but came out well overall I think. It’s thicker and at 100% infill. Also much sharper. Would certainly hurt to get punched in the face with this… “keychain”.
EDIT: I'd be happy to share the file too if anyone wants it. I'm not sure where I could upload it but I'd be willing to try.
Well yeah. You might as well buy a CNC mill with that money :D
I haven't tried SW, but from my experience with Creo, the workflow is very similar to FreeCAD. Designing 2D sketches driven by an algebraic constraint solver, extruding / pocketing them, and repeating indefinitely. You could run into similar problems as well, like if you make a sketch on an unreliable datum, and then go change sketches and dimensions earlier in the model tree, it is fairly easy to break the model. FreeCAD was notoriously fragile in this regard, but the 1.0 release incorporated significant improvements to what they call the "topological naming problem." None the less, I feel like these trials have made me better. There are often several ways to model the same geometry, but it helps to spend some time thinking about what is the most robust approach. What has the least likelihood to explode if you go back and change something? There is a methodology behind this which carries across to all CAD systems.
I'm kind of surprised to hear Blender CAD is in good shape. It always seemed like a cursed project to me, but I haven't taken a close look in a long time. Not to say Blender itself is bad. Like you said, It is probably the most capable free software program when it comes to doing 3D sculptures and such. I've only dabbled with it in amateur game development, and in that discipline it is incredibly solid.
Good to know. I should try it out, if only because it would help me get in the door for a CNC programming position.
For the record, the same is true for Creo Parametric. The main reason I haven't used it much at home is because of issues running it in WINE on Linux. Rebooting to run it on Windows was too inconvenient for me to invest much time in it. But if that isn't a problem, it's an option for anybody reading.
They do (I think) have a student or non-business version for cheaper but it's still relatively pricey, especially compared to free.
This is basically Solidworks too but has a lot of different tools for doing specific things and also has some pretty powerful simulation addons if you need to do anything like make load-bearing parts. Also is good for setting up custom workflows and alternate configurations and a bunch of other potentially useful stuff.
I'm talking about this specifically: https://www.cadsketcher.com/ I haven't used it in a bit but when I did it was pretty easy to learn. Probably not something you'd use for really complex models but seems great for stuff like 3D prints.
Solidworks might also have this issue... Not sure the best way to run it on Linux. I wonder if Proton would work for it?