I have a demo of alibre right now. Strange program. Very counter intuitive.
Like i want to draw a rectangle. No way to enter length and width. Something you can do when drawing a line ...
It is also annoying that there is only one viewport. In Rhino i have 4 ports. And i can grab an edge and drag it in any of the ports. Grabbing an edge highlights it in all 4.
I think alibre may work well when you have all exact coordinates. I don't have any coordinates.
I have a maximum outer dimension , and then i have accurate step files that show me where i need a hole , where i need a stud and where i need a cutout.
So i need a visual tool where i can place a cylinder , align it with an existing hole in a placed object , add a bit of material here , remove a bit there. All visual and without 'numbers' or calculation on my part. I simply don't have numbers. Thats what the program needs to give me. I start with known elements that come from various cad programs. There is 2 circuit boards that have accurate models including the parts that go on them. There is a touch display (psp style) , there is a wound coil ( that needs to fall in a circular slot i have to create , the coil will drop in and will then be epoxied in the slot ) there is a sideways opening where pogo pins will be inserted so i can slide in a lipo battery pack etc.
I don't know all the exact placements yet , apart from what is my maximum working volume and the shape of that volume , and where the display needs to sit on that volume.
Rhino works really well for that. I can simply draw two basic objects ( cylinder, ball, torus , come , trapezoid , cube ) and say : execute an 'or' or an 'xor' between these . And it builds the element on the fly.
My only fear is that , at the end of the design , people will say , oh rhino .. Thats a modeler , we can't use those files.
Years ago i played with solidworks and i found that very intuitive. I liked the fact that you could place a hole in two parts and tell the tool : these are linked. Move one and hole on the other part follows. SW understood that these need to line up. But right now SW is too expensive... Rhino is 1000$ that is acceptable. Alibre is also 1000$ but works 'weird' for what i need to do. Other tools are problematic because they cant read or write many formats. In the end i need two files : a step file and an stl file.
The step file so i can reimport in altium to verify everything. The stl file so the thing can actually be made. I'm going to use a 3d printer , but not the extrusion technology like the makerbot. It's a powder based machine as the mechanical strength is far superior to that of an extruder.