Blender? OpenCAD? Fusion360? (mostly interested in geometrical shapes for now - drone parts,… )
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I don’t do much designing myself, but have used Tinkercad when I do, tried Blender was too confusing at first, might be easier now I have mastered a few tricks on Tinkercad
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When I’m not taking advantage of the CAD software we sell (£10k a pop) then I use FreeCAD. It’s just had a major update and it’s pretty good. And yes, it’s free.
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3d builder. Its like msoft paint but for 3d. Id love time to sit down and learn fusion 360 at some point.
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On order of use…
OpenSCAD
TInkerCAD
FreeCAD
Python interface to OpenSCAD.
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Thing I like about Tinkercad are the amount of tutorial videos on YT
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I started with Autocad. Now I’m self taught Solidworks.
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Tried Freecad about 3-4 years ago but there were very few tutorials on line at the time, so went for Fusion360 which was better supported on YouTube at the time.
Have been happy ever since, and has continued to work through out several updates by Autodesk.
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I use AC3D by Inivis. It has a dated look but is very flexible and imports/exports multiple formats. Learning curve isn’t steep. It doesn’t do animation but results can be imported into Blender et-al for any animation.
Program does import/export STL models ideal for 3D printing.
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I would recommend fusion 360, it is quite intuitive and if you hover over the tools it tells you what they do.
I wouldn’t recommend blender to start with, it is aimed at more organic shapes and can be hard to get your head around.
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Is it easier to use now? It used to be a right pain…
I suppose it depends on your background. I’ve been doing feature-based parametric 3D modelling with CATIA V5 for a couple of decades, so I know roughly what’s up. Having said that, the actual UI looks a bit more like SolidWorks, which I’ve barely had anything to do with.
I confess, I did get a little frustrated early on (a few years ago) with relatively simple models breaking if I tried to go back and modify them too severely, but I think that was mainly down to an issue they seem to have largely resolved in the 1.0 release. And I also read some documentation and adapted my methodology according to best practices, which helped. 
You’d think, as an engineer and a programmer, this would be right up my street but I can’t understand why I would want to write reams of code rather than doing something interactively by pointing and clicking. Chacun a son gout, as nearly nobody says. 
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Every day is a learning day.
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early days for me - but the lack of UI feels like something less I have to get familiar with tbh - I got where I wanted with OpenSCAD in a couple of hours and now genuinely interested by some of the advance features it proposes.
I can see some limitations when working with not so obvious geometrical shapes / require a large number of include/use nestings but it got me going in no time (granted - done loads of svg animations and the like in my youth)
Yes that’s the sort of issue I had as well.
link?
Nah… point and click… and AI please… Why isn’t there an AI way to do this yet?
https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
This was the page that helped my particular issue. I’m used to creating profile sketches on implicit faces - it seems things get much more stable if you create a Plane on the face and then the Sketch on the Plane.
It’s coming. Engineering parts are a bit different, but I’m pretty sure that’ll be coming, too.
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That sounds familiar… It’s been a while since I tried it. Tinkercad is usually enough.
Oh, I forgot this. This is why I’d be a useless salesman.
Edit: The sexy video page: 3DEXPERIENCE Platform
@earwig I’m on the FREECAD route as well 
came to it from a web based thing and it does me well so far 
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