3d+CAD+Tools

=3d CAD Tools=

3d CAD programs I'm interested in checking out. I think I'm settling toward either BRL-CAD or FreeCAD. At first, OpenSCAD sounded interesting in part because there's a lot of free projects on thingiverse, but it's a write source code and compile tool, not an interactive 3d editor tool like others.

fin
 * **Name** || **Price** || **Description** ||
 * OpenSCAD || free || free/open-source 3d CAD design program. Sounds like it doesn't have an interactive 3d model editor, you "write" the model in source code form and compile it for viewing and exporting to other file formats. Could be cool, could be annoying. ||
 * BRL-CAD || free || free/open-source 3d CAD design program provided by the US Army. Sounds like an interactive 3d model editor, which sounds better to me than OpenScad's work method. I had to add Lynx package ubuntu-desktop as a dependency for the Linux .deb package of BRL-CAD. ||
 * FreeCAD (capital F) || free || free/open-source 3d CAD design program. It's in the package system for Lucid, here's a.deb file for 32bit koala, and here is a discussion on compiling and dependencies for Koala. ||
 * freeCAD (small f) || free || Another free/open-source 3d CAD program from AR-CAD. ||
 * BlenderCAD || free || an attempt to add CAD design capability to the Blender free/open-source graphical 3d rendering software. I think that's a cool idea, but it seems very early, planning stage, and progressing slowly. There's a Blender port to AmigaOS,suggesting a port of this someday (sure you could port the others too), and I'd hope that the interface for both modes (mechanical design and artistic CGI) would be reasonably similar, so only need to learn one program to do both things. ||
 * CAD X11 || free or $50 || is both free cost and pay-for CAD program. The pay for version is less than US$50 and I would consider that buyable. Heck, I've got $1000 into Eagle PCB tools, this is cheap! ||
 * VeriCad || $650 || commercial CAD program supporting Linux, and costs $650 for a perpetual license. ||
 * TurboCAD || US$100+ || Deluxe may be suitable, but it's for Windows only. It's rather popular though. Would it work on Linux via Wine? Deluxe edition is on sale for US$99, Platinum is US$1500. ||
 * MeshLab || free || Open-Source tool for processing mesh files. Sounds like it may be more of a 3d graphics model thing, but says it supports stl files. One of the stated uses is to clean up 3d scanned models. ||