I design everything in Fusion 360 in the first place (e.g. Fusion), then I don’t have to turn SVGs into 3D. Rather the other way around. It’s mostly out of necessity – I don’t think I’d be able to translate how the parts fit together and draw them correctly in 2D space. I think there’s a kind of “art brain” you need to have for that, which I am missing. But I do seem to have enough mechanical design brain to be able to construct in CAD what I can’t draw on paper. I also greatly prefer the constraint and parameter based sketching model in Fusion 360 to the “eyeball and pray the dimensions are correct” system in Illustrator.
I have one tutorial of my own on this, although I’ll be the first to say it’s far from the best. And it’s a bit long. If it didn’t require so much work, I’d make more, but I’m lazy.
It’s been a while, but I seem to recall finding it easy to do some things and impossible to do others. But I don’t have any good examples at hand of the latter. I understand there are some third-party add-ons that make it easier to position things relative to each other, which I think is the general case of problems I’ve had with dimensional layout in Illustrator.
In the end, you can always do it if you sit down with a calculator and manually work out all of the coordinates. And then as soon as you want to move something, you get to start over.
I saw this too late, so you probably already have an answer. Husband is a 3D Generalist-does a lot of rendering- he uses Octane Render. I don’t know if there are better ones, he’s been using it since it came out in like 2008ish. So-I don’t know if it’s easy or not, since he was already really good at it before the program came out.
These are some work samples he did for a client about about 12 or 13 years ago using the render program. It’s only gotten better:
AND I just noticed I read the original post wrong. I was thinking rendering…husband uses an obsolete version of SoftImage to model…I personally can’t wrap my head around any 3D program…too much to learn.
Coming from the Adobe suite, I hated Fusion 360 at first. Now I love it, and am fairly proficient. Just took time, practice, and youtube to figure it out. I’ve also used sketchup in the past, but Fusion is my go to for everything 3D now.
Here are some screenshots of instructional materials for DIY Polyhedral kits The rendering of different materials looks great.
I know everyone is using Maya nowadays for the stuff my husband used to do, but he learned on XSI Softimage. He still uses it even though Adobe got rid of it forever ago. He said it is the best, and he can convert all the file types into what the other programs use.
If I did a lot of from-scratch designing in 3D, Fusion would be my go-to as well. Many other tools mimic their interface/controls. I just rarely create anything for 3D work from the ground-up.
I use “Lightwave3D” which is a mid-range commercial CGI package from a company called Newtek.
I even use it for simple CAD related tasks. The program only does CSG, it’s not parametric. So complex designs that might need to be tweaked a few times aren’t its forte. But it has much lower overhead for simpler designs.
As for rotating the entire design in Illustrator, yeah, no. It doesn’t do that (except maybe in some limited instances). Illustrator’s 3D features are really designed to be projected to 2D as a component of an illustration. Mostly meant for text effects and minor graphical embellishments. Definitely not intended as a tool for designing 3D objects that you subsequently intend to fabricate.
Third party add ons not needed just turn on smart guides, one or more of the snapping options and judiciously use regular guides. Layers are very helpful for isolating and locking reference objects.
Calculator not needed either - you can enter calculations in almost any numerical entry box in AI, even mix imperial and metric in thr same entry.
Sometimes I’ll copy a shape and rotate it to line up with the new one I’m working with. Referencing with smart guides and snaps.
If you layout your pieces in a way that slots A and tabs A are in the same axis, for example, you can grab the relevant mating points/lines and move them all together or grab them in smaller sets and use the ‘repeat last move’ (aka Transform Again) keyboard shortcut cmd/Ctrl+D.
If you want to enter numbers, hitting enter while you have the Move tool active (shortcut V) brings up an entry box.
With those native tools it’s quite speedy to work precisely in AI. (most of my AI work ends up as a physical object of some kind so I’m almost always working with precise dimensions)
There is way to export AI 3D to Photoshop which can then export a proper3D model (OBJ file) but it’s super janky and you should really use any other 3D modeling method for your own sanity.
Definitely Fusion360, regular updates and it’s relatively quick to learn once you get your head around designing in 3D and some of it is additive and some removal.
