I'm looking for something to do some mechanical drawings with. Does anybody know of a simple CAD program for doing 3D drawings, preferably freeware? This may be a tall order, but I want to make some "blobs" so I'd need something more than simple geometric shapes. I'm a computer engineer, so I don't know anything about this business.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Otherwise, feel free to use this thread to discuss CAD or nachos or boobs or whatever you will.

hrm, I don't know about freeware, but I've used Solidworks at my summer internship for the last 2 years. It's a pretty popular 3D CAD software package.

The kinematics package alone on solid works would be invaluable to an ME

Try searching SourceForge.

http://sourceforge.net/

also take a look at this program.

http://www.opencascade.org/

Try OpenFX
http://www.openfx.org/
-mm

Most of the computers in the ME department have several cad programs installed, that you could probably learn to use pretty easily. Im not sure if Solidworks is installed on them, its an o.k. program, but they do have Unigraphics and some have I-Deas, both of which are top-of-the-line cad programs and quite easy to use. They typically have tutorials under the help menus.

Rhino is pretty good. Rhino3D.com. It is an evaluation version, fully functional but will only save 25 times. Its a nice program though.

You guys are awesome, thanks for all the suggestions. I will check out all of these and see what works best for me.

That opencascade program looks interesting....

But... after the 200 meg download, it appears to just be a framework of libraries.... not really useful to a non-programmer like me. Poop.

If you check out the gallery of OpenFX, you can see that it really is a 3D autoCAD with extras.
-mm