Autodesk offers Tinkercad, a 3D modeling and design tool available free for educational purposes. Shapes are the building blocks of Tinkercad. Users can add pre-existing shapes, or import them. To adjust objects, users can rotate the workplane to adjust shapes or change views and input exact dimensions with the ruler. Custom shapes can also be created by combining elements.
N/A
Blender
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite available in under the GNU General Public License. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Blender Cloud is a related service accessible via subscription, and is a training and content platform providing access to expertise from the Blender Institute for advancing one's use of Blender.
Tinkercad is such a great program and I would recommend the program to anyone who wants an introduction to a simple CAD program. I have another colleague that is now using it in her classroom due to my recommendation. I have had students start with me in Tinkercad and eventually work their way up in skill and purchase other Autodesk products because of the enjoyment and opportunity that Tinkercad provided.
Blender is an excellent tool for everything from simple to complex 3D animations, the creation of 3D images, etc. It performs excellently in all of these areas. In the realm of 3D modelling, animation and rendering, there is very little that Blender is not suited for.
Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender.
Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc.
Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in.
Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections.
The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software.
The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender.
The Tinkercad provided projects were upgraded in some aspects but the text for the projects has not and can cause confusion.
Tinkedcad works best in Google Chrome on a windows machine but most of my students have Macs and even when using Chrome they run into issues that Windows users don’t
Tinkedcad is browser-based but, to have a program that would be tablet compatible would be invaluable. So far it has only really worked on a Surface Pro 3.
It would be great to see a render queue added. This would increase my productivity significantly. Currently I don't have budget for a render farm. Meaning I have to do my renders overnight, however some renders only take a few hours. A render queue would allow me to make the most of the 12+ hours I'm out of the office.
UV editing, in particular unwrapping or projecting can produce varied results.
Because while it's a pretty good piece of software, the default built-in commands, the interface layout, and certain functions aren't as logical in their way of being arranged and executed. This, of course, doesn't diminish its use or effectiveness in your field of work, but it is quite awkward at first. A big advantage is that Blender lets you customize the interface however you want as well as keyboard shortcuts and several general program parameters.
Autodesk Tinkercad is by far the most user-friendly 3D modeling program I have used, especially for basic 3D modeling tasks. MeshLab and MeshMixer have similar functions but are far more complicated to navigate and difficult to use. These programs also tend to crash frequently, which has never been a problem with Tinkercad. The fact that you can use Tinkercad without downloading any software also makes it far more accessible, as you can log into your account and edit your models from any computer. I use 3ds Max for more complex 3D modeling, but for small tasks I always choose Tinkercad.
Well, in fact, I haven't used any of that software, but there is one thing I know: Blender is free. That's huge for small business owners like me; it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. I have heard other people saying that the Autodesk offerings have some other tools Blender doesn't have and are better for animation, especially Maya, but no small-engineering business owner cares for that. Now, from the animation and artistic point of view, even if my business was making animated movies indie, I'd used Blender simply by its cost.
Autodesk Tinkercad has enabled us to engage our customers further by offering enrichment programs for their children which will help to inspire them into STEM careers
As it is a beginner-friendly software with increasing demand in the animation sector again, it positively impacts the business.
Except in some specific cases, no one will use Blender on their own at a professional level.
When I was a beginner, it took me a lot of time to learn, consequently designing the creation. But if we want to learn to master Blender, we can do it. As long as we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities.
