3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
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I think it depends greatly on your preferred workflow and what you plan to model. Parametric drafting like fusion involves creating dimensioned and constrained sketches and manipulating them. Where direct modeling like blender or plasticity is more like painting in 3D
You wouldn't create a figurine using parametric tools as all the fine detail would be impossible to constrain. At the same time a precise gear that needs to mesh would be difficult to model in a direct modeling tool as it's difficult to make the precise teeth
Well I suspect the custom stuff that I'm going to design will be utilitarian in nature rather than artistic- replacement parts, organizational stuff, a little attachment to something, etc. So I'll want precise measuring tools. If I print something more artistic, I'll probably rely on models that already exist, like DnD minis or something.
In that case, I would recommend starting with FreeCAD (get a 1.0 release candidate from the weekly builds github) and make sure to watch a couple of intro tutorials. There are tons of CAD packages with pluses and minuses (and that's exaggerated in their free tiers), but if you can start with FreeCAD and have it as your baseline, you can avoid a lot of cost and annoying business practices, though as I mentioned elsewhere, Plasticity is not a bad choice if you go in knowing its limitations.