Re: Roomiest Iron Man
I learned Blender in December and then Fusion 360 more recently. Blender works pretty well for shaping polygon meshes, but it's really easy to end up with a corrupt model that just doesn't print right at all. The boolean operations will often fail and parts will vanish when you try then.
Fusion360 is parametric, so if you design your model well, you'll be able to tweak some key size parameters and change the dimensions of your model really effortlessly. It's pretty easy to have something like a hollow part wall thickness as a parameter, so that if you discover a problem when printing, you can fix it in a few seconds without having to remodel the whole thing. The only time I ended up with a model that didn't print right was when I accidentally duplicated some geometry. Deleting the overlapping parts fixed that model, so I can't really blame Fusion360.
Both programs can be extremely frustrating at times. Neither one feels like a standard desktop user interface.
For scuplting or crafting polygon meshes, I guess Blender is quite good. Fusion360 is vastly better if you are actually trying to engineer something and you couldn't care less about the polygons. There are quite a few things that Blender can do that Fusion360 simply isn't capable of, but features like bending or warping models in Blender can be quite tricky to use.
One issue that I had with Blender was that in order to make an STL for a 3D print, I have to combine all my parts into a single mesh. If you need to change something, you often have to go back to the parts again and then re-build the combined object.
Blender is 100% free with no strings attached. Fusion360 (and other "free for hobby use" commercial software) leave you at the mercy of the publisher: they could decide to change their business model and then you end either having to pay or you could lose access to the software and your original models (you can of course keep any STL exports etc).
I learned Blender in December and then Fusion 360 more recently. Blender works pretty well for shaping polygon meshes, but it's really easy to end up with a corrupt model that just doesn't print right at all. The boolean operations will often fail and parts will vanish when you try then.
Fusion360 is parametric, so if you design your model well, you'll be able to tweak some key size parameters and change the dimensions of your model really effortlessly. It's pretty easy to have something like a hollow part wall thickness as a parameter, so that if you discover a problem when printing, you can fix it in a few seconds without having to remodel the whole thing. The only time I ended up with a model that didn't print right was when I accidentally duplicated some geometry. Deleting the overlapping parts fixed that model, so I can't really blame Fusion360.
Both programs can be extremely frustrating at times. Neither one feels like a standard desktop user interface.
For scuplting or crafting polygon meshes, I guess Blender is quite good. Fusion360 is vastly better if you are actually trying to engineer something and you couldn't care less about the polygons. There are quite a few things that Blender can do that Fusion360 simply isn't capable of, but features like bending or warping models in Blender can be quite tricky to use.
One issue that I had with Blender was that in order to make an STL for a 3D print, I have to combine all my parts into a single mesh. If you need to change something, you often have to go back to the parts again and then re-build the combined object.
Blender is 100% free with no strings attached. Fusion360 (and other "free for hobby use" commercial software) leave you at the mercy of the publisher: they could decide to change their business model and then you end either having to pay or you could lose access to the software and your original models (you can of course keep any STL exports etc).
