So far I'm finding it pretty intuitive once you get the basic concepts under your belt - and there are usually several ways to get to the same end result. Having learned the hard way (with TurboCAD) the importance of understanding how best to interact with a CAD system, I'm taking my time with the user-interface and most particularly trying to sort out the keyboard and other mouse shortcuts before I really dive too far into the rest of the feature set. So I downloaded SE last week - which took a little while, as it's about 3.5Gb - and whilst it's still very early days, I must say that I'm extremely impressed with SE already.
Here was a very serious piece of CAD software from a large corporate entity (Siemens). So, given that the "high end" CAD programmes seemed undesirable/unobtainable for one reason or another I had intended to start looking at FreeCAD for my future 'engineering' CAD needs.īut I was intrigued when I saw that Solid Edge (Community Edition) was available free to download (a lifetime license) with local drawing storage and ongoing updates. Alibre was free for the trial period but then it seemed to move to some kind of annual subscription fee (didn't like that idea much either). I'm afraid I didn't find Fusion 360 that easy to get into (I'm not exactly sure why) and it's cloud-based too (I found the whole start-up process irritating I'm afraid). But Open SCAD isn't going to support my 2D engineering needs, although it's certainly got me going in 3DP However, it does seem to be slipping behind current CAD technologies (it's not parametric for instance) and whilst I don't think CNC beckons for me any time soon - I am learning to 3D print using Open SCAD. I've known that one day I would either need (or want) to move on from TurboCAD DL (2D) which I've used for over 20 years and personally find quite functional.
The programmes are rock steady and bring features and facilities to the hobbyist that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The programmes have the feel of having millions of Euro's, Dollars or pounds spent in their development. I have had a good chance to use the Solid Edge 2D and 3D Community Edition free of charge programmes. The other downside is you can't tie colour and line style to layers, but I'll learn to live with that. The other good freeby I've found is NanoCad,but that has some features like tangent to 2 circles missing in the free versionĮxcellent thanks. When I offset a line, it insists on adding a dimension telling me how far I've offset it, which I then have to delete.
It's free and very powerful, but has at least one annoying feature (there might be more I haen't found). Following the demise of Draftsight I've been trying to get to grips with SE 2D.
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