"Best 3D modelling software? For a beginner? " Topic

Just got myself a Monoprice Mini Delta. I've been waiting for them to come into stock for some time, and now it's hear. There are truckloads of STL files out there, but obviously I want to design my own widgets. What's the best program? It should be free, run on Mac OS X, produce good STL files that won't give the slicer any trouble, and be learnable in fifteen minute. I am willing to flex a bit on that last one.

Any ideas?

Learn-able in 15 minutes? I am glad you are flexible on that!

For a total beginner I'd recommend sketch-up. was able to make simple suff in a few hours. Its fairly straightforward and with a bit of practice I managed to get some nice Napoleonic cannon designed and printed.
I'm learning z-brush now which is an order of magnitude trickier (and much more powerful)

Autodesk has done away with their free line, but you can still find 123Design. Really easy. My son used it to knock out Christmas presents for all of us and really liked it. OTOH, I used 3D Crafter for nearly a decade. There's a free version, which is what I began with. Very good. I use Carrara Pro now, but it's kind of pricey. However, DAZ 3D has their Hexagon software available for free. It's quite good.

Blender – there are many video tutorials on the web including low-cost pro training. The skills are transferable to video games.

Tinkercad (by Autodesk) has been recommended as a FREE basic 3D design program for 3D printing, allegedly it does NOT give slicing programs fits and it exports 'water tight' .stl's, which apparently Sketchup may not do, so you have to spend time finding pinholes and other errors.

Tinkercad runs within your browser so it will work on MAC and PC machines, uses the same commands on both so no need to relearn the program if you go somewhere to work that does not have your favourite platform.

Sketch-up models can be run through a free program called Netfabb which will detect errors and holes and fix them up, plus its handy for scaling the item.

I've been 'tinkering' with Tinkercad for my 3D printing. Fairly short learning curve, but with a lot of hidden functionality. I've used it to modify some existing STL's to meet my needs as well as a few simple designs from scratch. Check out the tutorial videos available. And of course it's free and browser based with cloud storage.

Another vote for sketchup, it too has extensive tutorials on you tube, just one trick to note, it was designed originally for architectural work and can have problems with extremely small items so with 3D printing you want to draw life size and scale down (or draw in meters when you want millimeters and scale down by 1000).
I use it for my spaceships that I sell on shapeways.

Robert

I have used Tinkercad recently to build things, and sent them to Shapeways for successful prints. I then made silicone molds and started mass producing in resin or dental plaster.

I have used Blender and 3DS in the past, so I had some experience. Tinkercad is really, really intuitive.

Negative vote for Blender. It has one of the most unintuitive interfaces I have ever encountered. Yes, 3D is hard but when other programs manage to do it in a usable way the argument falls flat.

Free? Why should somebody give you a program that does all of those things for free?