From sketchup to Printer and back to Sketchup

Hi there,

I believe I am transitioning from a beginner to intermmediate in terms of Sketchup skills. I am already capable of designinng basic sketches and modifying existing ones. However, I find it very frustrating having to use NetFabb to repair even the simplest design. Also, even worse is the process of changing a sketch that has been fixed because it get overloaded with polygons.
I've also installed Sketchup plugins to detect non-solid forms, export to STL and reduce the number of polygons, but they are far from production ready.

Lately, my research here in the forum tells me that people on the same stage tend to give up on Sketchup and adopt FreeCad or OpenScad. I have no issues with migrating, as I am a programmer, but I wish I could still do things visually.

So, the questionas are:
1. Is there a more productive process of designing with Sketchup, printing, adjusting and printing again?
2. Is there any paid tool that can help me to achieve this, without going bankrupt?

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Cheers,
Franklin Dattein

Which plugins have you got/tried?

"Solid inspector", "Export to DXF or STL", "Fredo 6 Rouded corners" just to name a few.
I actually spent a lot of time downloading and testing every single plugin I could find on the web, untile I gave up on Sketchup.

I moved on to OpenSCAD, which did the job well, but I was still missing the visual aspects, like measuring, moving and comparing things side-by-side.
After that I tried FreeCad for a couple of days, which is quite interesting, but a bit unstable and difficult to parametrize (I was coming from OpenSCAD which is fully parametric).

Finally, I found out Autodesk Inventor Fusion, which is tool I am learning at the moment. So far I am very satisfied with it.a

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Cheers,
Franklin Dattein

fsamir Wrote:
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> After that I tried FreeCad for a couple of days,
> which is quite interesting, but a bit unstable and
> difficult to parametrize (I was coming from
> OpenSCAD which is fully parametric).
>
What version of FreeCAD?
Was it 0.13 which is a big improvement over 0.12

It is 0.13. It is quite good, indeed. However, what blocks me is the fact that the parameters can't be defined by variables and formulas like "${external_width/2}"