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SolidWorks actually had/has a product aimed at the hobbyist crowd just like Fusion. Used to be you could get a free copy with membership in some aviation relat
by inferiorhuman 4y ago
SolidWorks actually had/has a product aimed at the hobbyist crowd just like Fusion. Used to be you could get a free copy with membership in some aviation related professional org.
- dekhn 4y agoI had solidworks sales people contact me and we chatted. No matter what i tried, they wanted to charge me multiple thousands a year. Any free copy would eventually stop working for example when I updated to a new version. I'm happy with Fusion 360, it solves a collection of problems for me well enough that unless I see a similar program for less money (I already became proficient in FreeCAD and OpenSCAD before switching to Fusion 360), I don't plan to switch since I've already invested a lot of effort into mastering the fairly complicated user interface and feature set provided.
- inferiorhuman 4y agoExperimental Aircraft Association used to toss in a free copy of the SolidWorks "education premium" product or whatever it was called. EAA membership is on the order or $40/yr so there was some migration after Autodesk decided to gut the hobbyist version of Fusion. SW realized they could do the same so the offer is now half off the cost of a castrated social-media-ified version of SolidWorks (3DEXPERIENCE). For hobbyist stuff at least Fusion is by far the least painful option, but the bar is set really, really low. FreeCAD is a gigantic clusterfuck to put it charitably (akin to using an awl to carve a drawing out of cardboard versus pencil and paper). OpenSCAD is neat but it really suffers because OpenSCAD is basically developed and maintained by a single person.