Looking for a good free program for designing terrain and make plans that you can print out and cut after or that can shows the measurement on the printed page (or some other good solution to get it done with Foam core and a knife). I have no real experience with anything like this so it should be as simple as possible. And I can't afford to buy one. cheers, MAlgol
I think you can print to measurement using GIMP, and it's free. I use ti mostly for printing the "skins" I glue to boxes, however ^^U
Autodesk has quite a selection of free software for students. Tinkercad is possibly what you are looking for.
I do all of my designs in a 2D vector graphics program. I use Adobe Illustrator myself, but there are some free alternatives that will do the same job.
Sketchup is great for 3D design and it's easy to pull pieces out and make a flat view with dimensions for a cutting plan, but after the 1 month trial you lose the ability to export PDF images and have to use JPEG which doesn't retain vector information so may not scale right on your printer. What sketchup isn't great for is producing textures to be glued to stuff you want an image editor type program for that. Robert
Sketchup i have tried and will probably go back to sometime, its a tad heavy but I guess most it at the start. Had a look at Tinkercad the other day. Seems really simple at first at least, will try it out more.
An idea that somebody suggested long ago on the original forums for a very similar thread was to use the level designer of a FPS game. It fills all the checkboxes we need, and by it's very nature it'll give you a 3D model of the scenery at the end for you to walk through. In fact, i imagine that somebody could take one from a free software game and adapt it for our needs.