As I wrote earlier today, I’m looking for a tool to make machine part CAD drawings on Linux. I now tried Art Of Illusion and VariCad. Here’re some results.
Art of Illusion
Simple enough to use, Open Source. Works nice if you need to create nice 3D objects but I didn’t feel it’d be good for serious high precision design. Following a tutorial here I was able to create this nice hour glass – I was surpriced to see that yes, I was actually able to do it and to me the result looks very good! If I ever need to create something like this I’ll run it again (unless I have the patience to learn Blender).
Hour glass with Art Of Illusion
VariCAD
Starting from 499€ for Linux – a commercial software. I tried the test version (DEB and RPM available) and I must say, it works! It took me some hours again to go through the first 8 tutorial pages from here but as you can see, the result is something what you’d need to design machine parts. Too bad it isn’t Open Source – now I need to try to convince someone to buy it for me.
I think I also noticed some bugs there when selecting lines/objects, maybe reporting those they’ll give me a free version :) And too bad it is only able to export BMP bitmaps, not PNG for example..
VariCad practice
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..so for $640, I can get a CAD app that works with Autocad files and runs natively on Ubuntu?
I’m going into architecture… and I’ll be keeping that in mind.
Take a look at FreeCAD:
http://juergen-riegel.net/FreeCAD/Docu/index.php?title=Main_Page
@ethana2: yes, it looks like VariCAD works nice on Ubuntu, installs from DEB and is a decent CAD tool.
WFM: “FreeCAD is still in ALPHA state and not ready for end user usage” :(
is your bug that the main window doesn’t receive keyboard input some times? They know about that, and it works with kwm as your window manager. But please do complain. I really want varicad to work with metacity.
@quitte: no, it’s not that, the bug is that sometimes it shows some lines selected even though they are not and then hovering mouse on those lines shows the ‘actual color’ of the lines (=shows that they’re not selected). I think rotating/moving does the same. I’m using kwin, not metacity.
Hey Risto! what’s wrong with you?
The only reason people have the impression that Blender is difficult is because selection is done with the right mouse button. Blender is the best app for your purpose.
I can’t force you to learn blender, but it just isn’t difficult at all
(you could have really dived into Blender if you used your search time to learn it…you just wasted your time)
@anon: heh, thanks for your contribution :) I wish you had told me this a week ago or something not to waste time.. Anyway, I’ve gone through some Blender tutorials and.. whatever the definition of difficult is, I think that VariCAD is so far most suitable for my purposes and I’ve learned to use it much faster than Blender.. I’m sure Blender is nice for some usage but if it’s “the best app for my purpose”, just makes me wonder why aren’t all mechanical workshops using it but *CAD applications instead..
Fair enough, sorry for the not-so-true statement :“the best app for your purpose”
:)