About a year ago I evaluated Cubify (Geomagic, Alibre, they seem to change names quite often).

It was very, very promising, right until the moment I started doing a real design in it. I hit so many bugs and problems, that I couldn't finish the work. Debugging constraints was pretty much impossible: if something went wrong (and it almost always did), I'd have to restart from scratch.

I can compare it to SolidWorks, which I also used, where debugging constraints is also a major pain point (why don't they make this easier?), but at least it's possible. And it is buggy, too, but much less so than Cubify, which means you can actually get things done.

From my point of view (external perspective of a software engineer), 3D modelling tools suck, in general. Few support parametric modelling, which consider a must-have, and those that do are pretty poor at it (discuss after you've created a parameter-driven assembly of multiple components in SolidWorks, and then decided to change a parameter name/value or move a parameter from a component to assembly-level).

I'm an ME who uses CAD on a daily basis and I'd have to say that yes at first parametric modeling in the current software packages is a challenge. But I'v found it is a learning curve similar to syntax in programming. Once you learn to construct features robustly you do it every time and you no longer have too many hideous errors. No different than programming.

JWR,

I would welcome your thoughts on just how to best hack these exact types of parametric changes in SolidWorks, especially at the component to assembly-level transition. It does seem pretty hopeless, as you say.

Email in profile

Oh, I am nowhere near expert with SolidWorks. What I end up with are fairly brittle constructs: I first build components (parameterized), then plug them into assemblies, then add key parameters to the assembly, and finally set up component parameters to track those of the assembly.

BTW, top-down building (e.g. starting from the assembly) has never worked for me. I always end up with an unmaintainable mess — but that could be my poor skills.

I used FreeCad a few months ago for the early prototype you can see in the video at www.flair.zone.

It doesn't support assemblies yet (although its on a branch!) so I just designed a linkage system extremely carefully and swiss cheesed some parts to avoid dealing with dimensions as much as i could. I used to use Inventor but Fusion 360 is nice - and its free for startups.

As soon as Freecad supports assemblies I will probably switch back. I hate booting into OSX for Cad work and back home to linux for coding.

Another vote for Fusion 360, especially on the Mac. I settled on that for 3D printing and hopefully soon desktop CNC modeling. It seems to be the only affordable yet not dumbed-down packages for OS X.