3D Modeling software

Crazy Climber · 23 May 2011 at 16:06

Does anybody know if there are any equivilant softwares for Solidworks or AutoCAD that will run on Linux.

I've read that they dont run very well if at all through Wine or other emulators and having totaly got rid of my windows install I now realise I want to used Solidworks and AutoCAD again... typical.

Any help is much appreciated.
Cheers!! CC

wannabedamned · 23 May 2011 at 16:09

The only one I can recommend personally is Blender. As I've not used any others, I'm currently learning how to use it myself.

http://www.blender.org/

You can pick it up easily via the software manager or 'Sudo apt-get install blender' in terminal

*edit its just called Blender, God knows why I insist on calling it blender 3D all the time.

inSilica · 24 May 2011 at 23:09

Another taker for blender, It was blender 3D for a while, now everyone just calls it blender... Best one to run natively on Linux IMO.

You can always have a Virtual machine in Linux (virtual box), with all your favourite windows software.. I have an XP VM (less resource hungry than Vista/7) on my 4th workspace, I comfortably run illustrator and Photoshop on there. I also have Gimp and Inkscape installed, so transitioning slowly but surely ....

Crazy Climber · 25 May 2011 at 10:38

Interesting, I had a quick look at Blender the other night and thin k I need more time with it...
I have also just started playing with Wine for another windows program.

Am I right in thinking you do not need to physically install Windows to use VM?

inSilica · 25 May 2011 at 12:32

Basically, through Virtual Box you follow some options to specify the type of VM, i.e. windows xp, specify HDD space, amount of ram (the more the better) etc... then you point the VM to an iso image-if you have one... or cd drive ... follow some instructions and install windows, as you would normally. I guess this is what you mean by physically install windows.

p.s. you can kinda forget about GPU acceleration for these progs in VM's ... I think they just run on generic drivers.

Crazy Climber · 26 May 2011 at 14:00

Cool thanks for that!

So I need my windows install CD for it to set its self up then in effect it will just run as another program?

Rroff · 26 May 2011 at 14:03

inSilica said:
Basically, through Virtual Box you follow some options to specify the type of VM, i.e. windows xp, specify HDD space, amount of ram (the more the better) etc... then you point the VM to an iso image-if you have one... or cd drive ... follow some instructions and install windows, as you would normally. I guess this is what you mean by physically install windows.

p.s. you can kinda forget about GPU acceleration for these progs in VM's ... I think they just run on generic drivers.

Virtual Box 3 and later have fairly good support for 3D with DX8 and 9 (can use pass through to the local 3D Accelerator for good speed if setup correctly) but a lot of 3D Modelling programs use Open GL or DX features Virtual Box doesn't support.

vertica · 26 May 2011 at 17:18

If you can get hold of a copy, Pro/Engineer had native linux support up to "Wildfire 3.0" IIRC

However PTC seem to have dropped linux support after the next release (have since change the name to Creo/Pro aswell)

Crazy Climber · 27 May 2011 at 08:49

well after much faffing again, I got Windows XP virtual box to work, and although I didn't really do much on it, Solidworks seemed to install fine.

on another note I got MemoryMap running on it too (or it seems to anyway)

More meddling to come over the weekend I think