I Like to Make Things with my Hands

It took me a while to understand why the 3D CAD programs I have tried so far rub me the wrong way. I have had my suspicions for a while, but it took some serious, sustained work in OnShape for the understanding to coalesce!

The problem? I like to make things with my hands. For years, if I made something, I'd pick up an object, look at it from different angles, see how it would fit on another, then make some cuts and stick them together. I would do this repeatedly, ironing out what works and what doesn't, until I got what I want!

Unfortunately for me, 3D CAD seems to be focused on creating engineering documents, and consider the creation of "objects" to be a side effect, helpful for seeing what you want to see, but nonetheless frozen in amber, with movement and placement handled separately in an environment completely different from the drawing space.

When I try to make things, however, I want to naturally move them, translate them, copy them, and flip them -- and rather than "assign" how they are supposed to move, I want the objects themselves be the "constraints" that show how things can and cannot be moved. And I want to do all of this while drawing my parts!

And because this approach to creating is rather messy, I would like to make notes in the parts space itself -- I want to draw little arrows with descriptions of what I'm trying to do, or why something I want to do won't work, or how maybe another idea would be better (or worse, as the case may be). In OnShape, I can't really do that -- any comment or note has to be off to the side, identifying the object(s) in question, but practically invisible when I'm in the thick of things.

Come to think of it, that's how I tend to "doodle design" things on paper. I guess I want a 3D CAD system that fits naturally into the workflow I had developed over the years, both as a doodler and as a mathematician! As I have pictured what I would like to do, I kindof have the impression that I want to "doodle" in a 3D environment -- I want 3D paper!

Having said all this, I cannot just design things on paper as an alternative to 3D CAD -- or rather, I can if I must, when I am sitting in a meeting, and trying to work out an idea on scratch paper -- but years ago, when I was getting frustrated with my initial attempts to use BRL CAD to model 3D parts, I wondered if I was struggling with reading blueprints rather than with BRL CAD itself, so I decided to take a step back, get out a compass, a ruler, and a protractor, and try to duplicate the blueprint myself -- and in the process, I found myself literally "pinching" and trying to "rotate" the picture with my fingers!

Thus, it became clear to me that, regardless of how awkward a particular 3D CAD program might be, it is a nonetheless a great step up from "merely" using paper and pencil to draw things! But that doesn't mean things can't be improved ....