The “Duckborb”
If you’re looking for a tutorial on Design, capital D, or something more like engineering this may not be the correct place. Just a quick and dirty rundown of what I’ve tried so far with design for 3D printing. (As opposed to downloading pre-existing models and printing them)
1. Rhino 6 / Grasshopper. I did not have much luck with this at all. I liked the software capabilities a lot and the McNeel Forums have some great inspiration but it just takes a lot of time to get up to speed with it. I chewed through several weeks of the free trial period just kind of mucking around with tutorials and not accomplishing a whole lot. I think if I had an extra $1000 laying around for a software license I would probably still buy it, just because if you have the time and money there is a lot you can do with it that just isn’t available in free alternatives. If you are interested in algorithmic design this may be your only choice, but I couldn’t actually get any of those features to play nice when I tried to use them outside of pre-constructed tutorial files. I think it just kind of takes a higher investment (both financial / educational and in terms of time) to really use something like this.
2. Blender. Blender of course is the free program that I think probably has the most users for stuff like this. It’s not easy to use either, but about halfway through my learning attempt I downloaded the pre-release version of 2.8 and that seems to be vastly more user-friendly than the stable version (2.79). The only issue I see here is that if you are trying to learn right now most of the tutorials etc. that are on YouTube and so on are for 2.79, which is very different. The UI totally changed and there are more/different features and some other familiar tools went away. If you are just getting started I would advise skipping over 2.79 entirely at this point.
Exporting the resulting .stl files to Cura from Blender was straightforward. I did not have any catastrophic issues, and I was able to successfully print one item I designed myself in Blender. HOWEVER, I noticed some problems with scaling (even at 400% - the resulting print was tiny) and some troubleshooting revealed that Cura may not have the correct exact driver for the printer I am using. (Monoprice V2 - it seems to think all V2 are the mini version) Some browsing revealed that another piece of software - MatterControl - may be better than Cura for the printer I am using. I downloaded that, but haven’t used it for anything yet. I guess that will be pt 2 of N.
