Usually when you buy a 3D Printer it will come with software however often 3D Printing manufactures don’t spend a lot of money developing their software as they are more interested in developing a great printer than the software that comes with it. This means that you really need to invest in either free open sources software or a paid software such as a CAD platform.
When choosing software you need to make sure that you choose a software that will perform that task that you want and allow you to reach the level of quality for your design. You don’t want to learn one software and then find out that actually it cannot perform the tasks that you want it too meaning that you have to buy and learn how to use another platform.
Below we have created a list of all the popular free and paid 3D printing software.
Blender – Free Open source content creation software.
3D Tin – Very similar to TinkerCad, although not as easy to us.
]Google SketchUp – Very easy to use.
3DCrafter – Free easy to use software and has the added benefit of allowing you to upgrade to 3D Crafter Plus if you want more features.
Anim8or – 3D character animation program.
Alibre – One of the cheapestCAMprograms.
Meshlab – Open source software for editing 3D triangular meshes.
OpenSCAD – software for creating solid 3D CAD objects. It is free software and available for Linux/UNIX, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It does not focus on the artistic aspects of 3D modelling but instead on the CAD aspects.