Comment by donatj
7 hours ago
I would kill for decent NURBS oriented 3D CAD software. I feel like the 3D printing community would absolutely thrive if they stopped dealing with polygons for things meant to exist in the real world.
Rhino is really the only fully featured tool in town, at least available to the general public at a somewhat "affordable" price (~$700 from the right reseller). I end up paying to upgrade every few years when compatibility with my existing OS finally breaks. Apple announced the removal of Rosetta in 2027 (dear god why?! I use so many apps that'll likely never be made native) so I'm gonna have to pay again then.
At least, so far, it's software I'm allowed to *own* rather than rent. I can run my old versions in perpetuity, particularly on an emulator. As someone who has 3D models going back to around the year 2000 in his collection, the idea of using any of these hosted solutions just sends absolute shivers down my spine.
OpenSCAD is really the best we have in open source non-polygonal modeling tools, and it honestly wouldn't be too bad if someone could slap a decent WYSIWYG GUI on it.
FreeCAD is actually pretty good since the 1.0 release. Far better than OpenSCAD for anything but highly regular and parametric objects (basically fasteners and art).
And better still in the upcoming 1.1 release. Lots of improvements.