I’ve used Solidworks for 15 years, and I think Onshape is close to as good for modeling, and now much better for collaboration and version control. Collaboration is great, but version control and configuration management is the killer feature of online CAD tools. These also facilitate typical collaboration which is at a part level more often than part level. The existing tools rely on a lot of discipline and are very hard to set up and maintain, and generally requires people assigned full time to maintenance (or full time to manually handle it in the filesystem). On the other hand, Onshape does not allow engineers to invent their own workflows.

For a software analogy, the existing tools are like sharepoint at best and cadfile_v2_final(Mike).prt at worst. Onshape (and I assume other) online tools are like github.

It's kind of incredible how big a pain in the ass the SW license and PDM servers are. Definitely requires full time IT support and small riots are likely to form when they try to upgrade them during a busy period, especially if someone suggests using an SP1 version.

For lightweight & quick conceptual work, even final deliveries most of the time, nothing beats a browser based available-everywhere tool. No files to sync, same tool to both view & edit the files.

I used Industry heavyweight Photoshop for 15+ years, Sketch for 4 and dropped everything for Figma[1] after playing with it for 2 days. Now my UX comps, UI sketches all available EVERYWHERE. All inspirations, rough concepts all stacked away in any browser I have access to. I move to different machines a lot (Macs/Windows). Used to carry around a USB stick (synced to Dropbox from my home computer).

Now it is nirvana - No syncing, No dropboxing or figuring out where my prototypes, v1, 'final-final-v1-1-edit-final' files, & source files are. Not only the files are available, but the viewer to view those files are right there.

[1] www.Figma.com - Browser based UX Mockup/Prototype tool.

That is a compelling argument. Be careful with the terms of use though, they can hide a few surprises. Example: in Vectary's terms of use[1] I interpret the section 4.6 as "backing-up your data is your responsibility. If our servers burn, we might not be able to recover your data and we won't be responsible for it".

That being said, the limits of Vectary's services seem to be clearly stated, so one can adapt to them (by using some storage drives from OVH, Digital Ocean or any such provider to back-up the data, for instance)

[1] https://www.vectary.com/terms-of-use/

I use Tinkercad[0] every single day, for rough mock-ups through to complete exported STLs that I then 3D print. I have Fusion 360 but find it faster/easier to whip something together in Tinkercard unless it has any complexity to it, and generally there has been nothing 3D printable that I can't do in Tinkercad, leaving Fusion 360 more for larger project design (stuff I'm going to make in mixed materials, like a complete robot).

I also love that if I get an idea in bed or when away from my PC I can use my laptop to log in and mock it up, or work on ongoing projects there.

As a maker/tinkerer/hacker I actually think Tinkercad (and all the related web based design tools) are one of the most exciting advancements in this hobby, along with 3D printers and DIY CNCs.

[0] http://tinkercad.com/

I'm 3D modeling on OnShape right now, and it's just because I can't be bothered booting into Windows to get Fusion. That's pretty much why I stopped using the latter, and only use OnShape. It's convenient.

How about casual use?

I know 3DS Max very well (at least I used to... Hopefully the synapses are still firing) but it's a zillion dollars for a licence and I probably need to use it maybe once a month.

I work mainly in Unity and 3D modelling is not my main focus. I would use a 3D package for some light editing and as a glorified file converter.

Nobody makes software to do this at a reasonable price so I usually head to clara.io

Definitely check out Blender -- they released version 2.8 a month or so ago and its miles ahead of where it used to be especially when it comes to interface.

Also free, cross-platform and super powerful. It also has a brand new real time rendering engine called "Eevee" thats really impressive.

> To put it another way, are you going to convince your entire art team to leave behind the toolchain they have used their entire career

Yes. Because they will start out using these tools. Having experts be able to oversee novices is very powerful, esp w/o having to transport files, load and diff, etc. An expert can hop into someones session, show a technique, do a quick critique and move on.

CAD tools generally have pretty good lock in. So that certainly helps with the long term the prospects.

I’m not going to convince my team to move over from the tools they use. But the engineering team that makes their jobs irrelevant because they bid by 50% lower through increased efficiency will.

Rendering is computationally heavy, so a browser is not ideal. However, offloading simulation, file storage, version handling, etc to the ‘cloud’ has boundless potential for productivity and efficieny increases.

gpu does a favor to this kind of rendering?

Solving the model is usually CPU bound while rendering is usually done by the GPU.

Yes i agree. There are some exceptions. You have Fusion360 (also autodesk) which is a slim version of Inventor. It is web based and used by lots of professional people. It also works quite similar to Inventor. So switching isnt that hard. But to go from 3dmax or maya to an entirely different ecosystem. I don't see that happen anytime soon.

From a hobbyist perspective, I gladly welcome the onset of cloud-based tooling. Most of these options (OnShape, in particular) have generous free tiers. I used SolidWorks in a previous profession and generally was very happy with it, but in no way could I afford a single seat license for "play."

I'll plug our product here as well https://3dc.io

I've recently started using 3DC and find it to be a wonderful creative tool. It's super intuitive and easy to use on the go, on a mobile device. I look forward to using it more in the future.

Nicely designed and has potential.

Missing (couldn't find) many useful and necessary components (e.g. explicit sizing, rulers/measurement, pivot points).