Recommended software

[SuperB]

Would I be better off using fusion 360 to create plans or will Inkscape work just fine? I am wanting to try my hand at making my on designs and cutting them out with my laser cutter.

 

[Grifflyer]

I think Inkscape will work better. I know @jpot1 uses Inkscape for all of his designs.

 

[Headbang]

I use inkscape mainly. Sometimes the tools in fusion 360 are useful tho. In fusion 360 you can make very dimensionally accurate sketches faster and easier then inkscape. Inkscape is easier to use to arrange things and do the final cleanup before saving to dxf. From there I go to estlcam to setup my cuts and export to gcode for my cnc.

 

[rockyboy]

I use inkscape mainly. Sometimes the tools in fusion 360 are useful tho. In fusion 360 you can make very dimensionally accurate sketches faster and easier then inkscape. Inkscape is easier to use to arrange things and do the final cleanup before saving to dxf. From there I go to estlcam to setup my cuts and export to gcode for my cnc.

Yeah, what he said!

I like DoubleCAD XT (another free software) for doing plans where I want the dimensions to be accurate, and I use Inkscape for designing skins that head to the printer instead of the cutter.

 

[SuperB]

Thanks Guys for the info!

 

[The Hangar]

How do you guys like adobe illustrator? I am using it since that is what @nerdnic uses to design, but I was curious how you think it compares to Inkscape.

 

[bracesport]

I recently changed away from Illustrator for 2D in favour of Affinity Designer - with the crazy costs of Adobe product Affinity offers all the same tools at a fixed one-off price - I think most 2D programs do the business well enough, so it is more important to learn how to drive it rather than it driving you!

For 3D, it seems FDusion 360 is quite popular on the forum - I use Onshape which was recently developed by the original Solidworks team - it is like google docs for CAD and I think it is far superior to many of the current 3D systems, but again it is only as good as the driver on the mouse - it does not currently have a good unwrap tool, but otherwise it is brilliant - for those in the know, it has a wonderful set of solid editing tools including boolean operations!