This came up in my RSS feed and I had to try it out. The program is aimed at people people who machine parts or use a 3D printer for private projects, but I was more interested in assessing it's usefulness to this community. There's a lot of people using sketchup for stuff on these forums because it's easy to use, but there's some things that it doesn't do very well or it takes a large number of steps to do. That's where you'd want to turn to a solid modeling program as opposed to use sketchup, which basically makes everything out of paper.
If you want the tldr version, click here.Overview
Screenshot of the program and a small block I modeled.It can import a good selection of files, including sketchup and obj files. Notably absent here is 3ds, which is odd considering it is one of the industry standard file formats and it's also an Autodesk format. However, you can only export to a small selection of formats that would be great for 3D printing or sending off to a machinist to make some parts, but are not incredibly useful for say, making levels or props for a game. You would need to hop through another program. One thing of interest though is that .stl is a fairly straight forward plaintext file format for 3d information. It wouldn't be that difficult for someone to say, write a .stl to .blb converter. In fact, this is probably best application of the program for our purposes that I can think of at the moment.
The interface itself isn't that complicated, although for me, coming from Sketchup's toolbars and AutoCAD's ribbon and command line, I had to try and wrap my head around it a bit. You basically click the category of the operation you want to do. A pie chart comes up and you pick the command you want. I really hate these wheel selection things but I digress. Fortunately right clicking will bring up a more conventional command menu, as well as a wheel of some common commands (I still hate command wheels). There don't appear to be any keyboard commands, coming from sketchup and autocad I expect the L key to start drawing lines. Maybe this interface is more typical of Inventor, I haven't used Inventor in about 3 years. It also supports mouse gestures by right clicking and dragging to draw. I haven't quite figured these out.
The wheel interface.The program comes with most of the primitive building commands you've used in sketchup, like push, pull, rotate, circles, polygons. It also comes with many of your favorite 3d modeling programs from autocad, like loft, revolve, fillet, etc. These are really useful commands that are either not possible to do in sketchup or require a bunch of steps to complete. 123D seems to be based on Inventor, considering it's crash logs are filled up with references to
Inventor Fusion.
Includes your favorite commands.This program is pretty smart too. If you draw a hole through something, and then delete the hole, it knows to fill it back in. If you drag a hole outside of a box, it will keep the portion of the hole still around. It's got some limits but it's still pretty useful.
Box with a hole.
Moved the hole over.
Quick Facts
- The program is free.
- Relatively easy to pick up. Need help? Here's a five part tutorial on the website.
- Takes up about 500MB.
- Saves in it's own 123D file format.
- Imports .sat, .obj, .skp, .dwg, .123c, and .stp files.
- Exports to .stl, .sat, .dwg, .stp. Great for 3d printing, not so great for Blockland. DWG support is for both 2007 and the old standard (R14 I think).
Download
Go ahead and try it out.
